Cleveland Scene Magazine
10/26/2000
 

A Melodic Treat
Before this Parade passes by, head down to the Palace.
By Keith A. Joseph
 

In an age when musicals have become multimillion-dollar corporations,
jerry-rigged to simulate amusement park thrills and last year's multiplex
movie hit, how thrilling it is to come across a work that uses its musical
vocabulary to illumine the human complexities of social history.
 

Every civilized citizen owes it to himself to see Parade, the most
underrated musical of the decade. This remarkable work chronicles a
lynching, yet it is also a love story and an astute biography of a
post-Civil War Atlanta.
 

Playhouse Square, atoning for its dazzling lack of imagination in endlessly
resurrecting Les Miz dinosaurs, has pulled off a coup by being one of only
six cities to grab this one-of-a-kind tour.
 

With a score by Jason Robert Brown and a book by Driving Miss Daisy's Alfred
Uhry, this is a musicalization of a sad footnote to American history. Leo
Frank, an alienated young Brooklyn Jew running a pencil factory in 1913
Atlanta, is falsely accused of raping and murdering a 13-year-old girl. This
horrible event is used by a people who have not stopped fighting the Civil
War to reopen the battle between North and South, Jew and Christian. Frank
is offered up as a scapegoat.
 

Musical theater has a propensity for trivializing history. Here, we see the
opposite: The creators, including director Harold Prince, have reinvented
the wiles of musical theater just as Orson Welles tweaked existing film
technique in Citizen Kane to burn into our craniums an uncanny mélange of
image, sight, and sound.
 

Brown, like Sondheim, composes a superb historical pastiche effect: A
malicious, jubilant ragtime is used to show the town's exaltation over a
guilty verdict; a plaintive spiritual, wistfully sung by the murdered
child's mother, ends on a chill with the virulently anti-Semitic "I forgive
you, Jew," expressed like a pious python. In a scene that compares to
Gypsy's "Rose's Turn" for exposing a warped state of mind, we see the
libidinous fantasies of the factory girls as they render the meek and mild
Frank into a song-and-dance devil, luring innocent Christian girls into his
den for deflowering ("Come up to My Office"). With fascinating historical
breadth, the show begins with a young soldier going off to the Civil War,
singing of the "Old Red Hills of Home," and ends with the same soldier as a
defeated old veteran mournfully singing the same number, illustrating a
society's lingering shame. The Hal Prince trademarks -- use of torches,
stunning tableaux, and rare privileged moments, such as the ghost of the
murdered child once again heading eagerly toward that Memorial Day Parade
she would never make, bidding the murdered Frank a tender Happy Memorial Day
-- all fill the stage with images as vivid and hypnotically compelling as a
propaganda poster.
 

Ironically, this musical suffered much the same fate as its murdered hero.
Jaded reviewers, whose aesthetic senses had been ground to dust by too many
bad musicals, stoned it, declaring it unfit to run among such hits as Jekyll
and Hyde and Naked Boys Singing. Subsequently, it sank like a treasure
galleon among Broadway's treacherous shoals.
 

Thankfully, its creators were too stubborn to allow this beautifully wrought
artifact to sink into the realm of barely recalled cult esoterica. As a
labor of love, a road company was mounted. These traveling follow-ups
usually emerge as little more than smudged mimeographs; yet, this
incarnation, assembled by its original creators with the added bonus of the
composer conducting the orchestra, is far more assured and vibrant than its
predecessor. David Pittu makes a much more authentic kosher Leo Frank than
his golden-haired Tab Hunterish predecessor. This is a company obviously
smitten with its material.
 

Here is a work that has every right to be a cynical and nihilistic
exposition of an innocent man's destruction. Instead, it endures as a
romance about a rekindled love between a condemned husband and his fiercely
heroic wife, and even more important, also rekindles our love for the vast
possibilities of the American musical.
 
 
 

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