A show about historical injustice offers no consolation to the politically informed.
The musical “Parade” at Playhouse on the Square has a timely and depressing thing or two to say about the state of our country in 2025. When POTS announced the season last year, it probably didn’t predict that Donald Trump’s second presidency would be an apt curtain warmer for this story about a notorious 1915 lynching.
The “parade” of white supremacy in America, the show reminds us, boasts a long line of Grand Marshals leading up to the present. But then, the audience for whom this show appeals is aware of this history. And if there’s one downside to the timing, it’s that many potential audience members are currently sick of all the reminders.
“Parade” is the musical tragedy of Leo Frank, a Jewish man from New York who moved to Atlanta for work as a supervisor at National Pencil Company. In 1913, a young female employee was found murdered in the factory’s cellar. Frank was one of the suspects. As many ensuing books and documentaries about the incident — along with playwright Alfred Uhry’s script for “Parade” — make clear, evidence was lacking, but anti-semitism was overabundant. It fueled the media coverage, the trial, the conviction, the appeals process, and eventually the mob that would drag Frank from prison and hang him.
“Parade’s” 1998 Broadway debut turbo-charged the career of composer/lyricist Jason Robert Brown (“Bridges of Madison County,” “The Last Five Years”). His technically complex, piano-powered character-driven music, with jazz and pop influences, is most appreciated, perhaps, by the performers who get to sing it. As critic Ben Brantley noted of the New York premiere, the score’s “intellectual remove” gives it an artful but chilly feeling. What’s left for warmth is the relationship between Leo and his wife, Lucille, played in this production by Justin Asher and Brooke Papritz.
These powerful and sincere vocalists are tasked with pulling off the composer’s biggest creative leap: teasing a love story out of a lynching. Asher and Papritz smoothly swirl together Brown’s melodic lines like soft-serve chocolate and vanilla — tasty yet, as previously noted, cold.
Other musicals have also explored dark chapters in American history. “The Scottsboro Boys” (on Broadway in 2010), presented by Playhouse just a couple of years ago, centered around another highly publicized trial in which a group of Black teens was falsely accused and convicted for raping a white woman. John Kander and Fred Ebb employed a minstrel show conceit, evoking both a period piece and a Brechtian exercise in audience discomfort.
Playhouse’s “Parade,” directed by Dave Landis, feels tonally like a “Ragtime” spin-off set in the Deep South. The minimalist set by Brooklyn-based designer Tim McMath has a rib of southern flavor in its wooden balustrade and Memorial Day bunting, but a full rack of it in the spectral Confederate flag that covers the entire rear wall of the stage, like a faded mural on the side of a cotton gin.
Rachel Lauren, a freelance lighting designer from New York, tints the stage with the aura of vintage photography hand-colored for emotional emphasis. Similar to her work in “The Lehman Trilogy” at Circuit, the lighting makes the right moments pop.
“Parade” is a hard show, a serious show. But also a problematic one for any director trying to balance the story’s attempt to inform and maybe enrage with musical numbers that also aim to be theatrical. When a reporter (Daniel Stuart Nelson) gets his career-making murder scoop, he bursts into a gospel-y tent revival number with an almost Vaudevillian dance routine — something out of Kander and Ebb’s playbook. It got the biggest applause of the night. That’s how badly we need “42nd Street” right now.
Outside of Leo, Lucille, and Georgia Governor John Slaton (played by Chris McCollum) who gets a redemption arc, the other citizens in this musical might, before the election, have been plucked from a character pool of yokels that populate other works set in small-minded communities — shows like “Inherit the Wind” or “The Crucible.” Now they just seem plucked from the suburbs. Sadly, the bleached Confederate flag evoking the America of the past may as well be in living color.
The historical postscript to events portrayed in “Parade” is that many decent folks and organizations did mount a pressure campaign to prosecute the organizers of the Leo Frank lynching. The perps were easy to find. Many participants posed for photos in front of Frank’s body. No arrests were ever made.
The denial of justice for such a sensational case seems like such a pre-civil rights era problem until you remember that shortly after Trump’s billionaire backer brought the Nazi salute back to Washington, Trump freed over a thousand insurrectionists whom he had personally ordered to overturn an election. Trump subsequently put a moratorium on new cases by the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division — the federal prosecutors who handle discrimination claims and hate crimes.
I think we can see where all this is going. It will make for quite a musical. ✒ C.B.
“Parade” at Playhouse on the Square continues through Feb. 16. Call (901) 726-4656.