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By Carol Davis
 LOS ANGELES—More than ten years ago the Alfred Uhry (book) Jason Robert Brown (music and lyrics) musical drama Parade closed shortly after it opened at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theatre. Lincoln Center co produced the show with the Canadian producing company Livent, Inc. One doesn’t usually associate politics with theatre but politics rears its ugly head everywhere. That’s history past and present. The show ‘was scuttled’ after 84 performances. Ironically both Uhry and Brown won Tony’s for their work on the show. In an interview with Show Music magazine in 2000, Pulitzer Prize winning author Alfred Uhry said, “We just got screwed”.
Alfred Uhry, Atlanta born and bred, penned Last Night of Ballyhoo and Driving Miss Daisy among other notable works. Both plays are set in Atlanta. So it’s not unusual that Parade, which is not only set in Georgia but has an historical link to the Uhry family, would be something he holds close to his heart.
(Uhry's great uncle owned the pencil factory where the murder of Mary Phagan took place while his grandmother had been friends with the widow, Lucille, of the man wrongly accused of it, Leo Frank)
Parade recounts the story of Northern born and educated Leo Frank “who became the only known Jew to be lynched on American soil." Frank was a Jew and a Yankee who married a southern belle and settled in Atlanta after being offered the job of superintendent of The National Pencil Factory, which in the play is described as being owned by his wife’s uncle. He is accused of murdering 13-year-old Mary Phagan, (“Ah. Not Fagin as in Dickens. Phagan as in phalanx,” Frank chuckles at his private joke) about one of the young girls who worked in the Factory
In 2007 director-choreographer Ashford presented the new reworked Parade at London’s Donmar Warehouse in London with less pomp and a more streamlined look than a reworke piece by Hal Prince, who had co conceived the original. It is being remounted now at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles through November 15, and it is spectacular in its dramatic effectiveness, musical score and human face.
Don’t expect Mary Poppins or even the thoughtful South Pacific. This is musical drama at its highest level with part operatic, part ragtime, part turn of the century melodies, military drums that rock the soul, stir the emotions, rattle the heart and convince anyone seeing it that it deserves another shot at Broadway or at least to be seen by every school child across the country as it is being done at some morning performances for the LA Schools.
Parade’s prologue is set in Marietta, Georgia in 1861-1865 during the Civil War ("The old red hills of Home”) with the send off of a newly enlisted Confederate "Young Soldier" (Curt Hansen) and segues to 1913 to the Frank house. It is fifty years after the Civil War and the big Confederate Memorial Day Parade is being touted. Lucille Frank (the lovely Laura Pulver) is annoyed to learn that her husband Leo (T.R. Knight the perfect choice in his musical theatre debut) is going off to work rather than a picnic and the annual celebration she suggests.
Frank is a workaholic but that’s the least of his not so endearing qualities. He is standoffish, somewhat haughty in his relationship with his young bride and not a little disgruntled about being in the south. These attitudes come back to haunt him. “For the life of me I can’t understand how God created you people Jewish and Southern at the same time," he counters back at Lucille when she chides him for using the Yiddish phrase meshuggeneh to describe the South’s celebrating a war they lost.
But that was the least of his worries on that fateful day. By the time Frank gets to work, gives young Mary her pay check (with the festivities heard off in the background), goes home for the day and is hauled away in the middle of the night to the police station to be questioned about the brutal murder and rape of young Mary Phagan, (Rose Sezniak) to his singing Sh’ma Yisorel with a noose around his neck, Parade offers some of the best live courtroom drama, laced with sensational yellow journalism, religious hatred, prejudiced jurors, an over zealous DA, Hugh Dorsey (Christian Hoff) corruption at the highest levels in Governor Slaton (Michael Berresse and also the crazed journalist Britt Craig) and more southern cruelty than one can imagine.
As they say on one of the television channels, “This is Real TV not actual.” Only this real drama in the life of Leo Frank is a black mark on history and the south and a wrong that was eventually brought to national attention. After Frank’s conviction Dr. David Marx, rabbi of Atlanta’s great. Reform Temple traveled to New York to alert American Jewry that … anti Semitism played a role in Frank’s conviction. From 1913 to 1915 Frank sat in jail while his case wound its way through the courts until the governor commuted his death sentence and had him transferred to a work camp where he was later lynched by a mob of angry, anti Semitic hooded men of the good city and state of Atlanta, Ga.
“Jew money has debased us, bought us, and sold us - and laughs at us," Tom Watson (the very strong and convincing P.J. Griffith) editor of the Jeffersonian, a Catholic zealot newspaper, wrote, “In the name of God, what are the people to do?” (Program notes)
The story moves along at a pretty fast clip, while leaving nothing out, on Christopher Oram’s minimalist sets (He is also credited for the accurate period costumes) and beautifully illumined by Neil Austin’s lighting design. The two-tiered set is bare save for tables and chairs either carried in by the players or pushed into appropriate places. The upper deck is used to depict flashbacks, the office of Leo Frank and (using imagination) the high lofty place of the judge (David Gains) looking down and supervising the courtroom drama that eventually brings Leo Frank to his undue demise.
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Hanging above them all is a huge wall mural that, with Austin’s superb lighting, brings out the glorious past with the face of Jefferson Davis in full uniform and some Southern aristocrats surrounded by a pastoral scene. Conversely, there is a more recently tattered, peeling away at the seams mural, much like the post war days of the south, that have been flaking away to the chagrin of those waiting for the south to rise again. This is witnessed by the strolling off and on stage by the eerily looking Confederate sweetheart, Lila, with her parasol twirling over her shoulder, broad rimmed bonnet and full crinoline dress symbolic of their loss.
With Rob Ashford’s direction and a marvelous cast Parade brings to the fore all the drama needed to engage. T.R. Night is just right as the hand wringing aloof Frank always feeling like an outsider looking in on his life. Laura Puver’s Lillian is, at the outset, a dutiful wife proud of her heritage yet a little put off by her husband’s remoteness and superiority.
She has an operatic voice to die for and when she sings, “You Don’t Know this Man” your heart breaks. “It’s Hard to Speak My Heart," Frank implores as he stands before the court to tell his side of the story. “I’m not a man who bears his soul….”
Together with Knight’s Leo they finally become a couple whose barriers are broken down when he realizes she is a woman to be reckoned with, forcing the Governor to reopen the case after she shows him the inconsistencies of the first one. This is the first time we see him as human and the first time their romance blooms. It’s one of the highs, if you will, in the show and a welcome one at that.
Christian Hoff, a local boy, is perfect as the ever pounding ambitious DA Hugh Dorsey, whose body language says it all. He is all over the place banging on tables, intense and driven (script notes), yet soft spoken when rounding up witnesses coaxing and intimidating them in order to get evidence against Leo. His solid build and strong voice are a convincing combination that works well here. (He won the Tony for portraying Danny DeVito in Jersey Boys).
When given the case, Dorsey dismissed the obvious suspects, Newt Lee, the factory’s night watchman and Jim Conley (beautifully played and sung by David St. Louis). St. Louis has triple duty and in his role as Jim Conley, the janitor and chain gang escapee and Gov. Slaton’s man servant. His rendition of “Blues: Feel the Rain” as he’s back on the chain gang piling boulders into a wheelbarrow with a guard over him. His raspy voice resonates pain enough to make the scruff of your neck prickle. When recalling his alibi a rousing “That’s What He Said” brought the company a rousing round of applause.
Ashford’s choreography is not only symbolic of a South past and present, but in one scene he has Leo and Lucille being lifted in the air on chairs as done at a traditional Jewish wedding, only this time it was after Frank was convicted by a ‘jury of his peers’. The symbolism of celebration makes us reel.
Tom Murray’s musical direction under David Cullen’s orchestration and Nick Lidster and Terry Jardine’s original sound design was a bit overbearing at times and it was difficult to follow all the words as sung by the chorus and sometimes the leads. Overall, however, the play never strayed far from Frank’s harrowing nightmare and the gist of it was never at question.
After the performance I had a chance to chat with Christian Hoff who told me he was both pleased and honored to be able to work in this project. He told me that Uhry came to some of the rehearsals and shared with them the times when as a youngster, every time the name of Leo Frank came up in family conversations, everyone went silent. It was the elephant in the room that no one spoke of. This is obviously near and dear to the playwright and it shows through. A production of this caliber and a topic of this history needs to be on Broadway.
Parade plays through November 15 at the Mark Taper Forum. For more information visit www.centertheatregroup.org. It's a must see for serious theatergoers aching to see something new in musical theatre.
See you at the theatre.
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