Bravo, Cygnet Theatre! Their largest production to date easily ranks among their finest. Cygnets doing such a magnificent job with Parade, its hard to believe the musical had an iffy track record.
Although it earned Tony Awards for book (Alfred Uhry) and score (Jason Robert Brown), Parade ran for only 84 performances. Some said the book was too bulky, others that Broadway is allergic to serious musicals. Both may have been accurate. A trimmed version now tours the provinces even Atlanta with great success. And Id stack Cygnets up against any of them.
Confederate Memorial Day April 26, 1913 Atlanta, Georgia: 13-year-old Mary Phagan was found dead in the basement of the National Pencil Company. Shed been raped and strangled. When he paid her wages, superintendent Leo Frank may have been the last to see her alive. He became a magnet for suspicions: he was nervous when police interrogated him in the dead of night; and he was a Yankee, educated at Cornell University, and a Jew.
Of the witnesses who paraded through Franks trial, several young women alleged that he violated them. Inflamed with anti-Semitism, itching to rush to judgment, Atlanta condemned Frank long before the judge sentenced him to death by hanging.
Like the infamous Dreyfus Affair of the 1890s (a Jew, wrongly accused of treason, condemned to Devils Island), Leo Frank ignited an international debate. When the governor commuted Franks sentence to life imprisonment in 1915, vigilantes snuck him out of prison. They drove to Marietta, Georgia, near Mary Phagans home, and lynched him. None wore masks or hoods. Some took photographs.
The tragedy prompted the return of the Ku Klux Klan and the birth of the Anti-Defamation League.
Two songs set the tone for Parade. Although it ended almost 50 years earlier, in 1913 many Southerners still referred to the Civil War as the recent unpleasantness. A full chorus belts out the prologue, The Old Red Hills of Home. They yearn for purer, antebellum times. The anthem recalls the eerie Tomorrow Belongs to Me in Cabaret.
Enter Leo Frank, alone: eyeglasses and frumpish-brown Yankee-style tweed suit (Shirley Piersons costumes are fingerprint-precise). When Leo sings a soliloquy, How Can I Call This Home? the excellent Brandon Joel Maier performs with his body and his strong, often pleading voice. Ticks and restless hands establish Leos nervousness long before the police arrive. Maiers every move sets him apart from his surroundings.
From afar, Parade sounds like yet another injustice of the month musical. Uhry, who wrote Driving Miss Daisy and The Last Night of Ballyhoo, re-creates the horror but also transforms his subject. In the midst of mass hysteria, Leo and wife Lucille fall in love, maybe for the first time. They commemorate their bond in a knockout duet, All the Wasted Time.
Played by Sandy Campbell, at first Lucille just wants to assimilate. Shes so sheepish and afraid, she may not attend the trial. Then Campbell does an amazing thing: almost imperceptibly Lucille expands and deepens and takes charge. She sings You Dont Know This Man and Do It Alone with such conviction its hard to imagine anyone else in the role.
See the original post:
In the midst of mass hysteria, Leo and wife Lucille fall in love, maybe for the first time.
