Parade by Alfred Uhry (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Parade by Alfred Uhry
• I. B. Hopkins

PARADE. Book by Alfred Uhry. Music and lyrics by Jason Robert Brown. Directed by Michael Arden. New York City Center, Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre, New York. May 3, 2023.

Time moves peculiarly in Alfred Uhry and Jason Robert Brown’s sobering Parade, which was revived on Broadway in 2023 for the first time since its debut fizzled out after only eighty-five regular performances in 1998–99. Every day seems to be Confederate Memorial Day in Atlanta, as the sensationalized story of Leo Frank unfolds over several years and the audience’s sense of what precisely is being commemorated thickens. The major drama-turgical challenge of its ripped-from-the-headlines plot remains the fact that many theatregoers will already know the outcome: an antisemitic mob brutally lynched Leo Frank in 1915. The success of City Center’s revival is owed in part to the celebrity status of lead Ben Platt, who along with co-star Micaela Diamond gave a commanding vocal performance. More fundamentally, however, director Michael Arden’s meticulous attention to thematic cyclicality and innovative commitment to treating the musical as a ritual service of remembrance account for the widespread acclaim it enjoyed.

Uhry grew up in the Atlanta Jewish community, where, as the playwright describes, Leo Frank’s name remained verboten decades after the tragedy. The victim was accused, convicted, and later exonerated of the rape and murder of Mary Phagan, a 14-year-old white girl who worked in the factory he [End Page 108] oversaw. According to Uhry, it was precisely the untellable quality of the story that drew his fascination and ultimately served as the seed for the musical. Indeed, his narrative bears out this emphasis as it highlights systems of oppression—populist yellow journalism, the court’s racist and coercive use of chain gangs, absolutist political bosses, and the sacralization of white womanhood—rather than excoriating individual villains. Actual historical figu es do populate the stage, but apart from Leo (Platt) and his wife Lucille (Diamond), Uhry’s storytelling subordinates their personal heroism or culpability to the conditions that made possible the murder of an innocent man.

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“The Old Red Hills of Home,” featuring the company of Parade. (Photo: Joan Marcus.)

Playing out on Dane Laff ey’s uncrowded set, Arden’s stripped-down staging embraced this structural critique. As the cast gathered along the perimeter of a bare platform, they took a breath in view of the audience before beginning the Prologue (“The Old Red Hills of Home”). This gesture to the artists’ labor in rehearsing such a grim spectacle preceded the charged opening scene in which a young Confederate soldier writes home to his sweetheart, vowing to defend her. Two verses later, he has aged into a battered old veteran still sermonizing on the Lost Cause as the ensemble joins in for an exuberant Memorial Day anthem. Brown’s stirring lyrics and swollen harmonies encouraged the audience to sympathize—before children waving Confederate battle flags shocked the senses. This production brought the paradegoers down onto the apron, exhorting the audience to relate emotionally, and thereby drew a direct line between the theatrically appealing aesthetics of patriotism and the patriarchal violence at its root. (The scene recalled original director and “co-conceiver” Harold Prince’s earlier work, especially the discomfiting “Tomorrow Belongs to Me” in Cabaret.)

Sven Ortel’s projection design primed the audience for this first encounter with the allure of patriarchal morality and met it with contrast throughout the production. Prior to the musical’s beginning, a photograph projected on the exposed brick back wall of the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre panned eerily and gradually zoomed in on a meager historical marker in a parking lot. Later, a projected backdrop of newspapers, photographs, and other records that wallpapered the set served as an archive, attesting to an implied claim to historicity. This framing suggested that some people likely already knew the story; the value of its retelling, however, derived from the communal act of revisitation and reflection City Center pivoted from Uhry’s expository history, which seemed meant to startle the audience with the...