Review: A Timely, Baleful "Parade"

“Parade,” Ahmanson Theater, Los Angeles, June 17 – July 12, 2025

June 25, 2025 | By Bruce R. Feldman

In Brief: Handsomely sung and briskly staged, nonetheless this musical dramatization about antisemitism, yellow journalism, political opportunism, and romanticism of the Confederacy fails to rise above the limitations of its bleak source material, matter-of-fact book, and lackluster score.

Max Chernin leads the national company of Parade (Photo: Joan Marcus)

The story of Leo Frank, wrongly convicted in 1913 for raping and murdering a young girl and later lynched, is a challenging concept for a musical.

Indeed, when producer Harold Prince asked Stephen Sondheim to collaborate on it with playwright Alfred Uhry, Sondheim declined. He had just done Passion – a bleak tale of obsessive love – and didn’t want to do another heavy subject so soon.

Prince then introduced Uhry to aspiring Broadway composer Jason Robert Brown, resulting in Parade. Though it won two 1999 Tony Awards for Best Book and Best Original Score, the show closed after 84 performances and was quickly forgotten.

Flash forward to the 2023 Broadway revival. It again got rave reviews and again lasted only briefly, this time just 169 performances. Something’s amiss when audiences and critics disagree about the same show twice.

Talia Suskauer, Max Chernin as Lucille and Leo Frank in Parade (Photo: Joan Marcus)

Leo Frank was the superintendent of a pencil factory in Atlanta when 13-year-old Mary Phagan, a 10¢-an-hour employee, was found dead at the bottom of an elevator shaft. At first police suspected a night watchman or a janitor of the crime.

Succumbing to public pressure for a quick resolution, a zealous D.A. prosecuted Frank, even though only circumstantial evidence linked him to the murder. Of course, Frank, a Brooklyn-born Jew, was an easy target, thus adding a thick layer of antisemitism to the case.

Frank and his lawyers made a series of unsuccessful appeals. In1915, after reevaluating the court testimony and considering evidence not available at trial , Governor John M. Slaton commuted Frank's sentence from death to life imprisonment.

That wasn’t the end of the story, however. The case attracted national press attention that labeled the conviction a travesty. This outside criticism fueled even more antisemitism and hatred toward Frank from Georgians convinced of guilt whipped up by the local press.

On August 16, 1915, he was kidnapped from prison by a group of armed men, and lynched in Marietta, Mary Phagan's hometown. Nobody was charged.

The case, which has never been solved, has inspired books, movies, a play, a TV miniseries, and now a well-meaning but largely sullen musical.

Uhry wrote the hit play Driving Miss Daisy, using humor and sentimentality to deliver a deeper message. In Parade, he dispenses with the schmaltz and keeps the humor to a minimum.

An unscrupulous press whipped up a public frenzy against Leo Frank (Photo: Joan Marcus)

His sober book focuses on four aspects of the case: the blatant antisemitism of the time, the role of Frank’s devoted wife in getting the governor to commute his sentence, corrupt journalists who fomented public outrage, and the widespread nostalgia for the Confederate hegemony that continued to fester throughout the South long after the Civil War.

That might have been enough if the music were extraordinary. Brown’s score is more earnest than tuneful, occupying that precarious space between musical comedy and opera.

It’s The Most Happy Fella without the big crowd-pleasing songs that Frank Loesser interweaved to keep the audience both engaged and entertained, or South Pacific without Rodgers and Hammerstein’s gorgeous ballads and big production numbers.

The touring cast of Parade, now at The Ahmanson and minus its original star, Ben Platt, does as well as the material allows. Talia Suskauer is superb as Frank’s wife, Lucille. Max Chernin is effective as Frank but doesn’t quite rise to her level.

Michael Arden’s staging tries hard to make up for the inherent shortcomings of the book and score though ultimately cannot overcome the solemnity of the story and the prosaic writing and composing.

“Parade,” Ahmanson Theatre, 135 N. Grand Ave., Los Angeles, (213) 628-2772, www.centertheatregroup.org.