‘Parade’ Brings Important Message At Important Time To Minneapolis

There’s a strange symmetry to the Broadway musical Parade – playing through Sunday, Jan. 26 at the Orpheum Theatre – to current events. 

The show opened in Minneapolis on Tuesday, the day after Elon Musk made two Nazi salutes (or not) at an inauguration rally for President Donald Trump. In the summer of 2023, when the revival opened on Broadway, neo-Nazis protested the show. The 1913 conviction of Leo Frank – the protagonist of Parade – led to the formation of the Anti-Defamation League, which went on social media Tuesday to say that Musk’s one-armed salute wasn’t a Nazi salute. 

Parade is based on the true story of Leo and Lucille Frank, superbly played by Jewish actors Max Chernin and Talia Suskauer. The Franks are a newlywed Jewish couple seemingly struggling as a couple in Atlanta. Chernin nails the Brooklyn Jew-turned-Southerner in a time less than 50 years after the end of the Civil War. The play opens with Leo looking askance at the revelers of Atlanta’s Confederate Memorial Day parade and festivities, and he can’t understand the celebrations of a war that the South lost.

Leo Frank is accused of the rape and murder of Mary Phagan, a 13-year-old employee of the pencil factory he manages. The farce of a trial by ladder-climbing attorney Hugh Dorsey (Andrew Samonsky) forces Lucille to act, even confronting then-Gov. John Slaton (Chris Shyer) to get a pardon on commutation of the sentence.

Leo avoids the noose at the hands of the government, but after his commutation, he was kidnapped from prison, taken to Mary Phagan’s hometown of Marietta, Georgia, and hanged. 

In 1986, he was posthumously pardoned due to the state’s failure to protect him and to provide an “opportunity for continued legal appeal of his conviction.” In 2019, the Fulton County district attorney reopened the case, and as we’re told as the show is ending, the case is still open.

The show first hit the stage in 1998, with the book by two-time Tony Award winner, Pulitzer Prize winner, and Academy Award winner Alfred Uhry, music and lyrics by three-time Tony Award winner Jason Robert Brown, and co-conceived by 21-time Tony Award-winning legend Harold Prince. In 2023, it won the Tony Award for Best Revival of a Musical and Best Direction of a Musical.

There are several striking pieces to the performance.

The introduction of characters to the stage as they spoke was accompanied by photos of them from the time of the case. In what I can guess is pretty typical to the racism at the time, the picture of the Frank’s maid, Minnie McKnight, was a drawing in a frame, and the photo of the governor’s butler and maid didn’t have their names, but “Georgia Man and Woman.” Before the show, there’s a picture on the screen of the Georgia Historical Society marker near the site of Frank’s lynching.

Another is Leo staying on stage at intermission. There is no curtain, so you see him walking the elevated platform on stage after he’s changed into his prison clothes. He gets handed a cup of water and he paces around, or sits in his “cell.”

And most important is the torrent of antisemitism the Franks have to face, as well as racism, and historical connections to white supremacy; the show’s website compiled a list of resources to help theater-goers understand some of what is tackled in the show. 

It’s definitely not a feel-good musical in the vein of many that come through the Twin Cities each year. But in a time of rising antisemitism and the pitting of groups against each other, there may not be a more important show that comes through town. 

For more information on the show and to get tickets, go to the Hennepin Arts website.