America's past and present collide in Parade - Chicago Reader

It’s pretty unusual to hear a prerecorded curtain announcement from a sitting U.S. senator at a touring musical. But in the case of Parade, now making a short (and absolutely not to be missed if you can help it) stop at the CIBC Theatre with Broadway in Chicago, it also feels appropriate.

The senator in question is Raphael Warnock of Georgia, and the musical deals with a gross miscarriage of justice in the state over 100 years ago. The Black senator (and man of the cloth) wasn’t just reminding us to turn off our cell phones and not take photographs during the show; his voice itself was a reminder of how things have—and haven’t—changed in both Georgia and the U.S. since Leo Frank was lynched in 1915.

Parade
Through 8/17: Tue and Thu 7 PM, Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 2 and 7:30 PM, Sun 1 PM; also Sun 8/10 6:30 PM; CIBC Theatre, 18 W. Monroe, broadwayinchicago.com, $35-$125

Anti-Semitism, racism, child labor, toxic “Lost Cause” mythologizing, corrupt officials eager to make their political bones off scapegoating marginalized people—it’s all present in Parade in some form or another, and of course increasing at warp speed in our present-day republic. And yet, Georgia did elect both a Black man and a Jewish man (Jon Ossoff) to the Senate in 2020. Without making a single political pronouncement, Warnock’s voice sets the stage for considering how this musical still reflects the darkest impulses of our national character, while offering hope for overcoming the darkness with justice and empathy.

First produced in 1998, Parade features a supple and soaring score by Jason Robert Brown (who took the assignment from original director Harold Prince after Stephen Sondheim turned it down) and a well-constructed book by Alfred Uhry (Driving Miss Daisy) that handles the many characters and agendas in the story with efficiency and intelligence. The original Broadway production scored Tony Awards for Brown and Uhry. The current production, directed by Michael Arden, won the 2023 Tony for best revival of a musical and for Arden.

Frank, a Brooklyn-born-and-raised Jewish man, was arrested and convicted in 1913 for the murder of 13-year-old Mary Phagan, who worked for ten cents an hour in the Atlanta pencil factory where Frank was the manager. Phagan was found strangled in the basement of the building on April 27—the day after Confederate Memorial Day, which was the last time she was seen alive. In 1915, after Georgia governor John M. Slaton commuted Frank’s original death sentence to life without parole, a gang of men broke into the prison housing him and hanged him in Phagan’s hometown of Marietta, Georgia, some 20 miles outside Atlanta. (The show also hints at the tendency to mythologize rural areas as sweet and innocent “real” America, and cities as dens of violence and iniquity.)

Frank’s lynching helped lead to both the formation of the Anti-Defamation League and a resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan. As referenced in projected text at the end of the current revival, the case is now under review with a special unit of Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis; Frank received a posthumous pardon in 1986 in recognition of the state’s failure to protect him from the murderous mob, but at the time, the state took no stance on his guilt or innocence. It is now widely accepted that Leo Frank was not the man who murdered Mary Phagan.

Frank is, however, an easy target not just because of his faith, but also because he’s a northerner and a closed-off person. As played by the splendid Max Chernin, the Frank we meet here is tense, unhappy, and definitely homesick for Brooklyn, where, as he sings at one point, people who look and talk as he does are everywhere. As he prepares to go to the factory office that fateful day, he grumbles to his Georgia-born wife, Lucille (Talia Suskauer), that he doesn’t understand a parade and celebration for the people who lost the Civil War, which is hardly the way to make friends and influence people in the white community of Atlanta.

As a prologue with a Confederate soldier and his sweetheart 50 years earlier makes clear, the Civil War never ended for a lot of people (not just in the south). It just moved to different fronts. (Charlottesville? January 6? Anyone?) Seeing a young boy in 1913 eagerly waving a Confederate battle flag leaves a visceral sense of horror, given what’s been going on most recently in our national history.

The emotional center of Parade is the relationship between Leo and Lucille. The latter grows from a sheltered and spoiled woman who, in the first scene, tells her husband that her Black housemaid can pick up the hairpins she’s dropped on the floor to one unafraid to confront Governor Slaton (Chris Shyer) at a party about the outrageous way prosecutor Hugh Dorsey (Andrew Samonsky) conducted her husband’s trial.

Dorsey, with the help of fire-and-brimstone populist demagogue Tom Watson (played here by Griffin Binnicker), leveraged his highly compromised conviction of Frank into winning the governorship of Georgia after Slaton left office. The former governor and his wife, fearful of mob violence in the aftermath of his decision to commute Frank’s sentence, moved away from Georgia for a decade—a fact that hits particularly hard given the assassination of Minnesota Democrat Melissa Hortman in June and the fascist threats against so many other Democratic politicians and judges. (Slaton’s story also reminded me of Illinois governor John Peter Altgeld, whose career ended after he pardoned the remaining defendants in the Haymarket uprising.)

Lucille grows tougher over the course of the musical, and Leo becomes more tender toward her. That we see this all through the myriad outrages visited upon them is one of the enduring miracles of this show. Uhry and Brown have managed to combine some of the satirical elements of Chicago with the earnest sense of courtroom anger and thirst for justice threaded through To Kill a Mockingbird, along with the latter’s warmhearted domestic elements. Glory hound reporter Britt Craig, played initially with oily charm by Michael Tacconi, feels like a southern version of Chicagoʼs Mary Sunshine, but we see a more sympathetic soul eventually emerge underneath the thirst for scoops reflected in the song “Real Big News.” Clever repetitions of themes and images add shades of nuance to what could be a ham-handed jeremiad against judicial malpractice.

In “Come Up to My Office,” Chernin’s Frank dances with the “factory girls” who testified against him as a workplace predator (later, their testimony was found to be coached and invented by the prosecution). This reimagining of the choleric Frank as a secret libertine finds its parallel in a party scene at the governor’s mansion, where Slaton tries to avoid talking about the growing controversy around Frank’s conviction by dancing and flirting with women guests in “Pretty Music.”

The person most often suspected of killing Mary is factory custodian Jim Conley, who testified that he helped Frank move the girl’s body to the basement from the manager’s office. Conley, a Black man, served a short sentence as an accessory. As played by Ramone Nelson, particularly in the blues-inspired “Feel the Rain Fall,” Conley is at least a man who knows more than he’s ever going to tell about what actually happened at the National Pencil Company on April 26, 1913.

The fact that a Black man’s testimony was used to convict a white, albeit Jewish, man was notable at the time. The fact that so many Black men have themselves been murdered by lynch mobs on false charges of raping and killing white women remains indisputable. In the second-act opening number, “A Rumblin’ and a Rollin’,” the governor’s servants, Riley and Angela (Prentiss E. Mouton and Oluchi Nwaokorie), sing sardonically about the multiple racial ironies and paradoxes of the Frank case as northerners come down to protest his conviction. “I can tell you this, as a matter of fact / That the local hotels wouldn’t be so packed / If a little Black girl had gotten attacked.”

Dane Laffrey’s set design uses a raised central platform surrounded by benches, tables, and chairs and bedecked with patriotic bunting to suggest how the Frank trial loomed large in its time, and how it continues to resonate in ours. Lighting designer Heather Gilbert’s work reflects the chiaroscuro feel of sepia photographs and dark southern nights, while Sven Ortel’s projections of archival photographs and news clippings connect us with the past and present.

Chernin’s Frank sits onstage throughout the intermission, which comes right after he’s convicted—a reminder of those who wait for justice. Brown’s score, rendered with beautiful clarity here by the entire ensemble under the musical direction of Charlie Alterman, reflects Sondheim’s influences, but it’s never derivative or pandering. There are hints of Civil War battle songs, hymns, and ragtime riffs, alongside ballads and rousing group numbers. “This Is Not Over Yet,” where Leo celebrates the hope of an appeal, is jubilant and heartbreaking at the same time. We know what’s going to happen to him, but he doesn’t, and we hate to see that momentary happiness end.

Similarly, the gorgeous duet “All the Wasted Time” for Lucille and Leo at what turns out to be their last meeting cements the growing love under duress for the embattled couple, who might never have learned to treasure each other without the travails of the trial. And Mary herself, played with winsome charm by Olivia Goosman, isn’t forgotten. The white balloon she holds is a poignant reminder of murdered children across all times and regions. Parade focuses on how her tragedy was leveraged by a bloodthirsty mob bent on avenging far more than the death of one child. But it also reminds us that she was the original victim in the Leo Frank story, blameless for what happened after her murder.

Both Warnock and Ossoff (along with several other Democratic senators) voted for the Laken Riley Act, which used the murder of a young white woman in Georgia by an undocumented immigrant from Venezuela to further deprive migrants of civil rights. I think that’s a sign that Parade isn’t merely a musical about a long-gone historical incident. It’s a reminder that we are all too capable of forgetting the lessons of the past.