There’s an incredible scene in the North American Tour of Parade, winner of the 2023 Tony Award for Best Revival of a Musical, now playing at Broadway in Chicago’s CIBC Theatre, in which a Black couple in 1915 Georgia engages in a bout of schadenfreude. They finally see progressive white Northerners giving a rat’s ass about the South’s neo-Confederate lawlessness, but only in defense of white, Jewish Brooklynite Leo Frank, wrongly convicted in the 1913 murder of 13-year-old Mary Phagan at the pencil factory he’d moved to Atlanta to run at the behest of his father-in-law.
Prentiss E. Moulton and Oluchi Nwaokorie absolutely nail “A Rumblin’ and a Rollin'” — one of several showcases for Black voices in this production that, against the narrative odds (what else is new?), deliver the show’s most powerful, highest-octane moments — as an indictment of self-interest and hypocrisy writ large. But the song also serves as acid meta-commentary, which comes to a head with this lyric:
I can tell you this, as a matter of factThat the local hotels wouldn’t be so packedIf a little black girl had gotten attacked!
It’s exhilarating to see Jason Robert Brown’s score present the question this plainly to predominantly white audiences: How much appetite would there have been in 1998 — or in the revival year of 2023, for that matter — for a Broadway musical about Black people victimized and railroaded in the Jim Crow South? Yet the victimization of Mary Phagan and the subsequent injustice imposed on Leo Frank are in fact worthy of dramatic consideration, and sometimes you need to make an important point with material that stands the best chance of resonating with your core audience.
That lyrical honesty, matched by Alfred Uhry’s searing book, is probably why the 1998 production won Tony Awards for Best Book and Best Original Score. But that production also closed after only three months, suggesting the subject matter might have been too depressing for Broadway audiences. (The bankruptcy of co-producer Livent the month before opening did not help matters.)
Thank goodness, then, for revivals. This Parade is an absolute corker, at turns gripping, thrilling and mournful as it wrestles with weighty questions of personal and societal guilt that are incredibly relevant to our current moment. You’ve got the toxic marriage of self-interested government propaganda with the tabloid press. You’ve got blind rage stoked against perceived outsiders via racism and antisemitism. And — this is crucial — you also have men and women who ultimately refuse to bow down to an incredible miscarriage of justice and seek to undo it at tremendous personal cost.
Max Chernin and Talia Suskauer are stellar as Leo and Lucille Frank. Chernin, channeling the vibe of a young John Malkovich, gives us a complex protagonist. Leo Frank did not deserve the cruel fate that befell him, but with his chilly demeanor and dismissive attitude toward his adopted Southern city, he made it a lot easier for the populace to turn on him. It’s only after he sets aside his stubborn insistence on calling all the shots in his defense and begins seeing Lucille as a worthy partner in every respect that Leo becomes fully sympathetic.
An outstanding counterpoint performance is essayed by Ramone Nelson as janitor Jim Conley, who we first see victimized by corrupt DA Hugh Dorsey (Andrew Samonsky, also excellent) before intuiting that perhaps he was the real killer.
Even now, the 1913 murder of young Mary Phagan remains unsolved. But authorities in Atlanta reopened the investigation in 1999, in hopes of bending the arc of history once again toward justice. That’s the lesson from Parade today’s audiences need to take away.
Parade runs through August 17 at the Broadway in Chicago’s CIBC Theatre.
For a full roundup of reviews of this show, visit Theatre in Chicago.
Photo by Joan Marcus
