About Parade...
Leo Frank is an outsider in Atlanta: Jewish in a Christian world, highly educated and wealthy among the working class and working poor, Northern living in the South; even his relationship with his Southern Jewish wife, Lucille, is strained by his outsider status. When the body of 13-year-old Mary Phagan is found in the basement of the National Pencil Factory where she worked, Frank falls under scrutiny and rapidly becomes the leading suspect in the sensationalized and heated crime of the century. Tensions rise among the working class and political elites alike as they struggle for vengeance and justice for Mary, resulting in Leo’s conviction on the testimony of the factory’s black janitor Jim Conley. With the gallows looming in the background, Leo and Lucille take every chance to get Leo’s conviction overturned—and fall in love in the process.
Parade Fast Facts
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Book by Alfred Uhry (Driving Miss Daisy), Music and Lyrics by Jason Robert Brown (The Last Five Years)
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Parade was co-conceived and eventually directed by Hal Prince (West Side Story, Cabaret, Sweeney Todd). He brought Uhry and Brown together as a team and helped to shape the play structurally.
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The show dramatizes racial, religious, economic, and cultural conflict in turn-of-the-century Atlanta, while speaking to contemporary xenophobia, racism, and cultural conflict,
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Parade opened on Broadway on December 17. 1998. It closed February 28, 1999 after 85 performances. The show won two Tony Awards, for Best Book and Best Score of a Musical
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Parade's original production was met with mixed critical and popular reception.
