‘Parade’ Review: One of America’s Most Shameful Tragedies, Expertly Told

As audience members file into their seats, a black-and-white photograph is projected onto the backdrop of the Emerson Colonial Theatre’s stage. The photograph is unassuming — not overly composed, just a street in Georgia with a plaque. Yet the label is unmistakably clear: Leo Frank Lynching. As the lights dim, the photo slowly zooms in on the final lines of the plaque: “Without addressing guilt or innocence, in recognition of the state’s failure to either protect Frank or bring his killers to justice, he was granted a posthumous pardon in 1986.” What follows in the show is the story of Leo Frank’s tragic death, told in one of the most moving, harrowing, and expertly-crafted musicals currently performing.

Leo Frank, a Jewish man from New York City, worked as the superintendent of a pencil factory in Atlanta. When police found 13-year-old factory employee Mary Phagan murdered, they swiftly blamed Frank and put him on trial, and the jury sentenced him to death. Georgia Governor John Slaton reexamined evidence and testimony from the trial and commuted Frank’s sentence to life in prison, prompting outrage from Georgians, frenzied by a media circus of antisemitic reporting. Frank was quickly kidnapped from prison and hanged. First performed on Broadway in 1998, “Parade,” with a book by Alfed Uhry and score by Jason Robert Brown, dramatizes this entire saga from the day of Mary Phagan’s killing with increased importance placed on Leo (Max Chernin) and his wife Lucille’s (Talia Suskauer) relationship.

“Parade” may be a dramatization, but the touring production of director Michael Arden’s Tony-winning Broadway revival stresses the real. Each time a new character is introduced, a photo of the real historical figure appears onstage with their name. Sven Ortel’s projections take musical theater — an art form often concerned with lighthearted plots and suspension of disbelief — into the realm of documentary. While there are plenty of rousing group numbers and pretty duets, Arden’s production forces the audience to reckon with the fact that what happens in front of them onstage actually happened in real life.

Arden’s staging and Dane Laffrey’s scenic design also elegantly contend with complicity. Much of the action happens atop a wooden platform at center stage. Chairs and benches fill the remainder of the stage on either side. When actors are not currently in the scene, they sit silently and watch the action. Everyone sees the injustice happening yet does nothing. This decision is brilliant and makes the resulting crime all the more horrifying.

The genius of “Parade” comes in the form of how slickly seductive it is to believe bigoted points of view. Brown’s score, arguably his best, lends some of its most beautiful and tender moments to the villains — an in-media representation of the appeal of dogmatic, in-group beliefs. Bigotry can alleviate guilt, the show suggests; hatred can be exhilarating.

Nowhere are these creative and thematic principles stronger than in the trial sequence. Leo’s trial sees prosecutor Hugh Dorsey (a cunning Andrew Samonsky) orchestrate a series of spectacles to sway the jury’s opinion. First, in “Factory Girls / Come up to My Office,” Mary’s fellow employees (Sophia Manicone, Bailee Endebrock, and Emily Rose DeMartino) hauntingly sing of Leo’s supposed inappropriate advances. The song then suddenly morphs into a discordantly jaunty tune, in which Leo reenacts the supposed behavior.

Chernin, mostly diminutive and anxious in his performance as Leo, appears suddenly suave and confident. His new demeanor simultaneously underscores how preposterous their claims are for those who know Leo while also showing how such charged imagery ignites an already primed jury. When Jim Conley (Ramone Nelson), the factory janitor, delivers “That’s What He Said” — a falsified key testimony that sounds the death knell for Leo — it is a rousing, bring-down-the-house number. Nelson’s vocal performance and charisma are absolutely killer; he belts high notes and riffs with ease. Meanwhile, Chernin assumes a jerky, marionette-like physicality and acts out all of Jim’s allegations.

This combination of song and dance (choreography by Lauren Yalango-Grant and Christopher Cree Grant) is the kind of spectacle that typically ends with standing ovations. Here, however, they feel all the more insidious. This production uses tools of good theater to illustrate just how insidious Leo Frank’s treatment was.

Leo and Lucille’s relationship acts as the beating heart of an otherwise bleak story. At the beginning of the show, the married couple simply do not understand each other. Leo, a Northerner, thinks of most Southern people as backward. Their Confederate Memorial Day Parade — from which the show’s name derives — disgusts him. Meanwhile, Lucille, from a Georgian-Jewish family, does not understand why Leo acts so frosty and unwilling to learn the South’s culture.

As the couple stand by each other in hardship after hardship, they learn to understand and appreciate each other’s support. Suskauer and Chernin have beautiful chemistry and also complement each other — Chernin is awkward and Suskauer is self-assured. Vocally, too, the two actors match gorgeously. Duets like “All the Wasted Time” are absolutely beautiful and brim with emotion, only making the following events more heartbreaking. Uhry’s book places emphasis on this less obvious tragedy — that a couple may only learn to love each other when it’s too late.

Unfortunately, it seems that the themes of this production of “Parade” are even more prescient now than when the revival opened on Broadway in 2023. Consider us lucky that an artistic warning like this one should come in such an incredible form.

“Parade” runs at the Emerson Colonial Theatre through March 23.

—Staff writer Ria S. Cuéllar-Koh can be reached at ria.cuellarkoh@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @riacuellarkoh.