Review: PARADE at Belk Theater

A couple of simple online searches confirm the widespread shibboleth. “Everyone loves a parade” summons up millions of quotes and images – not to mention the occasional book, song, movie title, and a BRAND NEW sealed board game on eBay. Try “everyone does not love a parade” on Google and the engine blinks, seizes up, and drops a couple of pistons, yielding pretty much the same results, except for a couple of incredulous newspaper headlines.

“Who Doesn’t Love a Parade?” asked the New York Times in an opinion piece back in 2018. Jim Tews, the author of the piece, breaks rank with his headline in his opening sentence: “I love a parade.” No, we must go further back to 2007, when opinion writer Susan A. Nielsen wrote in the Seattle Times – on the Fourth of July! – asking, far more accusingly, “What kind of sick person doesn’t love a parade?”

“I recently became aware,” she begins solemnly, “that some people, including my spouse and closest friends, hate parades.” Mercifully, she does not name names, but you can almost hear their diabolical cackles in the background.

Not a peep of dissent from the Google results on the rest of that webpage or the next five. Everybody loves a parade; that’s the settled truth. Unless they are still alive and sequestered in Seattle.

So be forewarned: in Alfred Uhry’s retelling of the events that led up to Leo Frank’s murder trial in 1913 and his lynching two years later, his protagonist/victim is a man who despises a parade. A specific parade. Instead of attending the Confederate Memorial Day parade in Atlanta on April 26, 1913, he opted to go to work at the National Pencil Company, where he was superintendent. It will cost him.

Onstage at Belk Theater, where the touring version of Uhry’s PARADE opened on Tuesday, Frank gets to say that, as a Jewish man from the borough of Brooklyn, he still feels like an outsider: “How Can I Call This Home?” he laments. His bad feelings would only be exacerbated if he were to attend a parade celebrating the Confederacy. What is there to celebrate?

Atlanta prosecutor Hugh Dorsey and extremist pamphleteer Tom Watson were the foremost public figures – and the loudest – to proclaim that such an explanation for Frank’s truancy from the parade was impossible. No, the real reason he went to National Pencil that day was to ambush, rape, and murder 13-year-old Mary Phagan, who came to her workplace simply to collect her weekly pay. Quaintly enough, in cash.

For those who rushed to judgment against Frank without solid evidence to back their convictions, The Confederacy, civic pride, and celebration were all synonymous with this spurned parade. Just by choosing Parade for his title, Uhry was taking Leo’s side, flouting the idea that the word blends naturally with bliss. Led by Watson and Dorsey, the parading goes on despite criticism or opposition, becoming an orchestrated stampeding of Frank’s rights and humanity, deeply drenched in antisemitism.

Retribution for Dorsey and Watson? Hardly. Dorsey would subsequently be elected Governor of Georgia and Watson would become a U.S. Senator.

Plagued by technical difficulties when Halton Theater was young, the 2006 production of Parade at CPCC Summer Theatre didn’t rock my world, though my world is deeply drenched in Judaism and Jewish culture. So my wife Sue and I were surprised by how powerfully this touring production impacted.

It was like a stunning gut punch for me in the wake of Charlottesville, Pittsburgh, and the uptick of antisemitism since October 7. I felt physically nauseous as this horror of sensationalized press, suborned testimony, and a grotesque parade of cookie-cutter witnesses – factory girls who were obviously coached – took on the rancid smell of an inevitable conviction.

You could see Frank’s righteous self-confidence crumbling along with the suave composure of Luther Rosser, his cocksure defense attorney. Long before vigilantes entered the picture.

For others without my Ashkenazi DNA and yeshiva background, Parade might not elicit the same visceral response. It would be interesting to see whether Uhry, the Atlanta native who also gave us Driving Miss Daisy and The Last Night of Ballyhoo, would have had more success if he had worked alone on Parade – without the music and lyrics of Jason Robert Brown and the co-conceiving of the esteemed Harold Prince, who also directed the original production.

The upscaling of Uhry’s script was certainly warranted by the Leo Frank tragedy – and the crucial action that must unfold in a chaotic courtroom – but the timing was not ideal after Ragtime, painted on a far broader canvas, opened earlier in 1998 in a bigger house. Michael Arden’s restaging for the 2023 revival of Parade can also be off-putting if you don’t care for actors lurking silently around the action between scenes and becoming stagehands during transitions.

We cannot accuse the lead performances of any such artificiality. The passion of both of the principals reaches deep down into this cast, from Max Chernin as Leo to Jack Roden as Mary Phagan’s aspiring boyfriend. So the level of melodrama in their voices, ardently singing Brown’s Tony Award-winning music, rises to operatic levels and beyond.

Chernin is freed from meek innocence during Leo’s trial, becoming his own demonic caricature in “Come Up to My Office” as the robotic factory girls horrifically distort his personality. It was painful to watch him rise from his seat at the defense’s table, climb to the platform where witnesses gave sworn testimony – and Judge Leonard S. Roan presided – only to surrender totally to the girls’ perverse depiction of him and jubilantly surpass it.

Easily as talented as Chernin, Talia Suskauer struggles to clarify Lucille Frank’s marital problems with Leo, perhaps because her biggest opportunity, “What Am I Waiting For?” is saddled with lyrics by Brown that are too subtle. They have an arranged marriage in Uhry’s telling. While Leo has yet to cope with the cultural distance between Brooklyn and Atlanta, there is still an intimacy gulf after four years.

It would help a little if Suskauer sounded Southern more often, but if Parade is already grabbing you with its systemic intolerance, Lost Cause immorality, Gestapo cops, and hypocritical pomposity, the drawl deficit will evaporate amid the deluge of her straightforward “You Don’t Know This Man.” One of the chief beauties in Uhry’s script, true history be damned, is the growth of Lucille in Act 2, triggered by her “Do It Alone,” flung at Leo while he’s festering in jail, hoping for a retrial.

On the cast album, that song sounds like a vehicle for Streisand at her most histrionic, but Suskauer blazes her own trail. Implausibly, I haven’t found a single cover of this raging powerhouse outside of cast albums on Spotify.

As the ranting Tom Watson, we get Griffin Binnicker in a Colonel Sanders suit feverishly waving a bible – like a nightmare premonition of a J.D. Vance presidency. No less irritating or unscrupulous, Andrew Samonsky as prosecutor Hugh Dorsey is yet another evocation of the sort of pure evil politician we thought was ancient history.

There is more than a sprinkling of prejudice in Leo’s views of the South and his sexism. These go unchecked until Lucille rightfully scolds him and proves herself. As for Leo’s chronic alienation, aloofness, and lack of social skills, Uhry seems to overlook the fact that Frank was elected president by the 500 members of his local B’nai Brith and was instrumental in getting the national organization to stage its 1914 convention in Atlanta.

As a truly innocent little weakling, Olivia Goosman still stands out as Mary Phagan, and the creators are wise to bring her back to life a couple of times – during the courtroom trial and when the lynching becomes imminent. The only taint on her is her susceptibility to her dearest admirer, Roden as Frankie Epps.

It wasn’t her fault that Roden reminded me so chillingly of Hitler Youth once the mass hysteria began, another flashback to fascism that refuses to die.

Maybe the most delicate part of the storytelling is Uhry and Prince’s concept of the three African Americans who testify against Frank. Though both men are likelier suspects than Leo, neither Robert Knight as janitor Newt Lee nor Ramone Nelson as escaped prisoner Jim Conley comes off as a mouth-breathing predator. Knight is the meeker character (and the likelier suspect), yet even without Leo’s Ivy League education, Newt has a better grasp of how to deal with cops.

Same with Nelson, though as Conley he is gifted with a more elegant and dangerous street wisdom. You might easily associate him with the world of Porgy & Bess if you can imagine him as the best of Sporting Life and Crown - capsulized to a point where it under-employs Nelson’s talents.

Most nuanced among the Jim Crow roles is Danielle Lee Greaves as the Franks’ housemaid, Minnie McKnight. Scenic designer Dane Laffey gives us a playing space that looks more like a lumberyard or a construction site than a battlefield, a boulevard, a governor’s mansion, a courthouse, or a business executive’s home. We’re more inclined, in this hardscrabble world, to empathize with Minnie’s corruptibility or tribal loyalty.

And she has regrets over her incriminating testimony to luxuriate in after the trial. Unlike Chris Shyer as Governor Slaton, Greaves has little power to act on her remorse. Shyer has a wider, more satisfying character arc to work with. Thanks to projection designer Sven Ortel, we get stage-filling front-page headlines every step of the way, a parade of Watson-sparked alarms from the first news of the Phagan’s murder until Leo is hanged. So our first visit to Slaton’s mansion after the murder shows him prodding Dorsey to find and convict the killer as quickly as possible.

Capitulating to media pressure.

Later, once Lucille gets the green light to advocate on Leo’s behalf, the Governor of the great state of Georgia becomes Lucille’s private investigator, a white-haired Paul Drake to her Perry Mason. Then, in a U-turn to real life, he commutes Leo’s sentence. Nice try, Guv!

We have some empathy as well for Michael Tacconi as on-the-skids reporter Britt Craig, who “scoops” all other Atlanta reporters in spreading malicious disinformation about the case. Until he sees the light, he may seem like a tool for Dorsey and Watson. Just an average Joe grasping where his bread will be buttered.

Not a bit of empathy goes out to Evan Harrington as the Old Confederate Soldier and Judge Roan. Because of their majestic dignity, neither of these upright gargoyles has any regrets. To our great misfortune, such folks are still around, still waving their flags, and still parading.