<\/p>\n
The opening number of \u201cParade\u201d has always challenged its audience through purposeful discordance.<\/p>\n
Titled \u201cThe Old Red Hills of Home,\u201d the song begins with a wide-eyed Southern soldier bidding his sweetheart farewell during the Civil War. The tale then advances a half-century to 1913 Atlanta, where Confederate flags still fly and townsfolk pledge to \u201csing \u2018Dixie\u2019 once again.\u201d All the while, propulsive drums, lush strings and rousing melodies belie the lyrics\u2019 unsettling sentiment.<\/p>\n
That 2023\u2019s Tony-winning<\/a> musical revival is concluding its North American tour at the Kennedy Center \u2014 whose chairman is now President Donald Trump<\/a> \u2014 only amplifies the dissonance.<\/p>\n \u201cParade\u201d tells the story of Leo Frank<\/a>, a Jewish man who was scapegoated, imprisoned and ultimately lynched over the murder of 13-year-old factory worker Mary Phagan. The show is a parable of antisemitism, first and foremost, but also tribalism and intolerance run rampant.<\/p>\n It feels jarring \u2014 but defiant \u2014 to see it at a place taken over by a president whose rhetoric has been repeatedly<\/a> condemned<\/a> by the Anti-Defamation League, the organization founded in response to Frank\u2019s murder conviction. Kingsley Wilson, a Pentagon press secretary in Trump\u2019s administration, even decried Frank\u2019s posthumous pardon<\/a> by posting on X in 2023 and 2024 the widely discredited claim that he \u201craped & murdered a 13-year-old girl.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cParade\u201d booked its run under the Kennedy Center\u2019s previous leadership and, after other shows pulled out in the wake of Trump\u2019s takeover, is still being mounted at its Eisenhower Theater \u2014 complete with a preshow address recorded by Sen. Raphael G. Warnock (D-Georgia). The production thus has completed the promise composer Jason Robert Brown made in February, when he tweeted, \u201cPARADE is playing the Kennedy Center in August and we\u2019re not changing One Word.\u201d<\/p>\n Sure enough, the touring production seamlessly re-creates an exceptional Broadway revival that earned Michael Arden the first of his two best director Tonys. (The second came this year<\/a> for the robot romance \u201cMaybe Happy Ending.\u201d<\/a>) It helps that this take on \u201cParade,\u201d a 1998 musical with music and lyrics by Brown and a book by Alfred Uhry, originated as an economical New York City Center concert staging before transferring to Broadway. Mounted on Dane Laffrey\u2019s stately set, the production uses Sven Ortel\u2019s projections \u2014 featuring dates, names and archival photos \u2014 to orient the audience amid a slew of time jumps and characters to track.<\/p>\n Chief among them is Max Chernin\u2019s Frank, an Atlanta pencil factory superintendent with a chip on his shoulder and Brooklynite homesickness in his heart. After the magnetic Ben Platt<\/a> brought his signature vibrato and neuroticism to the role on Broadway, Chernin leans into Leo\u2019s dignity and detachment to deliver a more staid performance. As Leo\u2019s underappreciated (and underestimated) wife, Lucille, Micaela Diamond played off Platt with otherworldly vocals but an overly affected accent. Here, Talia Suskauer tones down the twang in a performance that still rings of pluck and persistence.<\/p>\n For anyone familiar with Frank, \u201cParade\u201d is unnervingly inevitable. The first act amounts to a kangaroo courtroom drama as the case\u2019s prosecutor, future Georgia governor Hugh Dorsey (a slimy Andrew Samonsky), holds witnesses\u2019 feet to the anti-Frank fire and a gossip-mongering reporter (Michael Tacconi) fans the flames. After intermission, Lucille\u2019s efforts to exonerate her husband take center stage as a fleeting triumph swiftly gives way to enduring tragedy. And the most pertinent of the musical\u2019s many gut punches arrives in the show\u2019s dying moments, when we learn that Tom Watson (Griffin Binnicker), a white supremacist whose inflammatory writing helped incite Frank\u2019s lynching, was subsequently elected to the U.S. Senate.<\/p>\n Featuring soaring anthems, jaunty show tunes, rousing power ballads and eerie laments, Brown\u2019s Tony-winning score arrives at the cross-section of melodic complexity and hummable accessibility. As Jim Conley, the janitor widely believed to have killed Phagan (Olivia Goosman), Ramone Nelson brings down the house with the bluesy \u201cFeel the Rain Fall.\u201d Chernin and Suskauer handsomely harmonize on the spine-tingling duet \u201cThis Is Not Over Yet.\u201d But the ultimate showstopper is \u201cThe Factory Girls\/Come Up to My Office,\u201d as three young witnesses\u2019 coerced testimony is hauntingly juxtaposed against an imagined version of Frank who actually committed the crime.<\/p>\n There will be fewer moments for theatergoers to relish at the Kennedy Center over the next year now that its Broadway Center Stage series is on life support and the buzziest tours are largely bolting<\/a> for the National Theatre. But my audience did particularly enjoy one, courtesy of Sally Slaton (Alison Ewing), the wife of Georgia Gov. John M. Slaton (Brian Vaughn at Wednesday night\u2019s performance). As her husband concedes that commuting Frank\u2019s sentence will end his political career, Sally responds: \u201cI\u2019d a whole lot rather be married to a fine ex-governor than be first lady to a chicken.\u201d<\/p>\n Cue applause.<\/p>\n