About Parade
“In the time we are currently living in, the story of Leo Frank is entirely relevant and sort of sadly obvious. This is a story of America. We can all pontificate about how we want this to change and how things have gotten worse or things have gotten better, but there is something about the American story that is embedded into Parade, and I think we have to own that part of who we are.”
–Jason Robert Brown, Composer/Lyricist of Parade
REVIEWS FROM THE 2007 DONMAR WAREHOUSE PRODUCTION, LONDON:
I cannot remember when the narrative and plotting of a musical last kept me engaged, let alone gripped…Parade makes a devastating, emotional show.
—Nicholas De Jongh, The Evening Standard
The music and lyrics of Jason Robert Brown serve to reinforce rather than subvert the gripping story Alfred Uhry’s book has to tell….Musicals primarily deal with romance: it is refreshing to find one that deals so eloquently with the roots of southern prejudice.
–Michael Billington, The Guardian
Here at last comes an original musical of real substance.
–Charles Spencer, The Daily Telegraph
Read about Who’s Who in Parade
STUDY GUIDE
The People Vs. Leo Frank Study Guide from the Anti-Defamation League.
ABOUT PARADE (From our dramaturg Celeste Kamiya): In 1913, on Confederate Memorial Day in Atlanta, Georgia, a 13-year-old girl named Mary Phagan was brutally murdered in the basement of her workplace, the National Pencil Company, which was managed by Leo Max Frank, a well-off New York Jew with a degree in engineering from Cornell and a wife who was a member of well-established, Southern Jewish royalty. Read more.
INTERVIEWS & INFORMATION ABOUT JASON ROBERT BROWN (Composer & Lyricist) and ALFRED UHRY (Playwright):
http://jasonrobertbrown.
https://www.writerstheatre.
FROM OUR DRAMATURG Celeste Kamiya
ABOUT PARADE
In 1913, on Confederate Memorial Day in Atlanta, Georgia, a 13-year-old girl named Mary Phagan was brutally murdered in the basement of her workplace, the National Pencil Company, which was managed by Leo Max Frank, a well-off New York Jew with a degree in engineering from Cornell and a wife who was a member of well-established, Southern Jewish royalty.
Phagan’s death sparked outrage and paranoia, utter disbelief that a little innocent white girl, the symbol of everything the South held sacred, could be struck down – and in a factory, no less, the very symbol of change the South had been forced to endure.
It made sense to Georgians that only Leo Frank, the kind of “other” who represented the North in the post-Civil War mythology that was whipped into a frenzy by Mary Phagan’s death, could have been the monster who slew the young factory girl. This xenophobic and anti-Northern narrative, combined with an incompetent police force, hoards of compelling witnesses who testified against Frank, a media frenzy fueled by yellow journalism, and potent, ever-present Southern anti-Semitism, resulted in a totally unfounded, unlawful conviction that is still pointed to today as one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in an American courtroom, an American Dreyfus Affair.
Forty-eight years before the events depicted in Parade, General William Tecumseh Sherman’s troops captured the city of Atlanta and began a violent, brutal march from the capital to the coastal city of Savannah, employing a “scorched-earth” policy and destroying countless Georgian homes, businesses, and lives in the process. Georgia lost everything.
It is often said that the South is still fighting the Civil War today – and whether or not this is true in 2018, it was absolutely the case in Atlanta a century ago. Though it may be difficult for us in the Bay Area at this moment in time to fathom taking pride in a culture which not only relied upon, but glorified slavery, we must acknowledge the entire South’s sense of profound loss of their way of life, their traditions, their values, and how that influenced Southern behavior and ethos in the years after the Civil War.
Georgia not only suffered the economic and cultural repercussions of the 13th Amendment, it endured deep humiliation and loss at the hands of Northerners. Furthermore, the ensuing industrial overhaul of the Southern states changed their formerly rural, agricultural, idyllic landscape into one of dangerous mills, smoggy factories, and crime-filled cities. These earth-shattering changes, as well as deep-rooted Southern traditions of tribe-mentality and xenophobia, made Southerners extremely wary of anyone who fit the labels of “Northern” or “industrialist.”
Enter Leo Frank, who moved to Atlanta to run a pencil factory which employed Georgian children and paid them ten cents an hour for dangerous, back-breaking labor – he epitomized the idea of a Northern industrialist, an outsider, the kind of person who had destroyed the Southern way of life. The story of Parade is set against this backdrop of tension, suffering, and hatred bubbling just below the surface.
After the Governor of Georgia commuted Frank’s sentence from the death penalty to imprisonment for life in 1915 due to a lack of incriminating evidence, the Georgian people’s feelings of intolerance and hatred against Frank, which had been temporarily quelled after his conviction, rose up again, resulting in riots, mobs, and the formation of a vigilante group called the Knights of Mary Phagan. These “Knights,” Georgia men who believed it was their duty to serve Frank the justice they thought he deserved, kidnapped him from his prison and hanged him from a tree. A month later, the Knights of Mary Phagan met with several other men on Stone Mountain in Georgia and held the first meeting of the revival of the Ku Klux Klan.
Frank‘s lynching stands out starkly against the background of Southern violence and vigilante justice, partly for its sensational treatment in the press, the fact that the case has become a milestone in American criminal justice history, and its involvement in the revival of the KKK. However, this particular lynching is most notable because its victim was white.
From 1882 to 1968, 4,743 lynchings occurred in the United States. 73% of the victims were black – and those are only the recorded numbers. It is likely there were far more—more black men killed for inconsequential “crimes,” or, more often, for no reason at all. Frank’s story, while tragic and deeply disturbing, is only one of thousands of examples of innocent people’s lives taken by vigilante justice, and it is undeniable that one of the reasons history, which is written by the winners, has remembered the case, is because Leo Frank was a white man.It is uncomfortable to admit, but it is highly unlikely any of us will sit in a theatre and watch a musical about the lynching of a black man any time soon.
It can be difficult to view the events depicted in Parade – the murder of a child and the railroading and eventual lynching of a man falsely convicted for a heinous crime – with anything but disgust and to dismiss them as horror stories from a less enlightened time than ours, performed by less enlightened people than us. But this would be a shallow interpretation of this rich historic material, ignoring the fact that we can see the culture of prejudice and injustice starkly in our world today. We do not have to look very far to see examples of sensationalism and falsehoods in the media, or how long-held bigotry, previously hidden under the surface, can come to a boil during times of national crisis, or just how profound the depths of human cruelty can be. To take in the story of Parade is to acknowledge our own shortcomings as a society, to recognize that we have not come nearly as far as we think we have in the last hundred years.
Celeste Kamiya