Creative Team
Alfred Uhry
Alfred Uhry was born in 1936 in Atlanta—21 years after the events of Parade. He comes from a prominent, wealthy Jewish family. Uhry graduated from Brown University in 1958. His first success as a playwright came in 1975, when he collaborated with Robert Waldman to write the musical The Robber-Bridegroom, for which he received his first Tony nomination.
Uhry's greatest-known work, Driving Miss Daisy, premiered at Playwrights Horizon in 1987. The play, which chronicles the relationship between an elderly Jewish woman and her African-American chauffeur, was heavily based on Uhry's own grandmother and her driver. Driving Miss Daisy won Uhry the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and an Academy Award.
For his collected works, Uhry has won a Pulitzer Prize, an Academy Award, and two Tony Awards.
Above: Hal Prince
The Atlanta Trilogy
Driving Miss Daisy and Uhry's later plays Last Night in Ballyhoo and Parade comprise his Atlanta Trilogy. All three plays explore the varied experiences of Atlanta's Jewish community and the nuances of Southern prejudice against both Jews and African-Americans.
Last Night in Ballyhoo, the second play of the trilogy, follows a highly assimilated Jewish family at the start of World War II, whose lives are shaken when a recent Jewish immigrant says they've abandoned their culture. Parade, the third and final play in the trilogy, shows the Jewish and African-American communities pitted against each other after a young white girl is found murdered in a factory basement.
From left: Uhry, Brown, and Lara Pulver (Lucille, Donmar Playhouse)
Family Influence
Uhry takes much inspiration from his family and events in their lives. The characters in Driving Miss Daisy are directly based on his family members, especially his grandmother, and Uhry refers to the play as a "family memoir."
Uhry also has personal and familial connections to the events and characters depicted in Parade. His great uncle, Sig Montag, owned the company where both Leo Frank and Mary Phagan worked. Further, Lucille Frank was a friend of Uhry's grandmother's, and Uhry has memories of her and other friends playing cards together.
However, Parade also grew out of the secrecy that shrouded Mrs. Frank's husband. Said Uhry:
I remember them all leaving the room talking about Leo Frank. And in the typical fashion of the way I grew up, I said "What is this all about Leo Frank?" They said "Never mind." Soon as I was able to get on the bus by myself, I went to the library and started looking things up and it just seemed so dramatic to me.
While the case fascinated Uhry for years, his work on dramatizing it did not begin until his collaboration in the 1990s with Jason Robert Brown and Hal Prince.
Jason Robert Brown
Jason Robert Brown was born in 1970 in the suburbs of New York City, where he learned to play piano. His earliest and greatest influences have been musical theatre composer Stephen Sondheim and pop/rock star Billy Joel. Brown attended Eastman School of Music for two years. His first musical, the song cycle Songs for a New World, premiered off-Broadway in 1995. He has worked as composer, lyricist, conductor, arranger, orchestrator, director, and performer, and he currently serves as Artist-in-Residence at SubCulture in New York City.
Brown's work is characterized by distinctive and often complicated musical composition with unusual harmonies and which break from standard four-measure lines. He is perhaps best known for his love duets. Brown's other Broadway musicals include 13 The Musical, Bridges of Madison County, and Honeymoon in Vegas. His semi-autobiographical musical The Last Five Years has had successful runs off-Broadway and was adapted for a film starring Anna Kendrick and Jeremy Jordan (who also starred as Leo in a one-night concert of Parade)
Brown joined Uhry and Hal Prince for Parade, having already worked as rehearsal pianist and music director for Prince. Like Uhry, Brown connected to the work through family and cultural heritage. In a 1999 interview, Brown said:
I was a New York City "cultural Jew". My grandfather, though, had been very Orthodox. He was first-generation American, coming over from the Old World. And my mother was not Orthodox, but she was a little more observant than I was. I think my mother had always felt, somewhere in her, that we were discarding all the traditions, that we were disrespecting my grandfather in some way... And I think when my Mom came and saw Parade that first time, I think she sensed me trying to cross that bridge back to my grandfather.
Brown also cites his grandfather as part of his inspiration for Leo.
Above: Jason Robert Brown at Tony's
Below: Brown, conducting a performance of Parade
Hal Prince
Above: Hal Prince
Below (from left): Brown, Prince, and Uhry
Harold "Hal" Prince was born in 1928 in New York City to theatre-loving parents, who took him to plays from a young age. Prince's career has been marked by both commercial and artistic success on Broadway, from his first musical The Pajama Game in 1954 through to The Phantom of the Opera and its record-breaking run. With a career of over sixty years, he has produced or directed some of Broadway's greatest musicals and has earned a record 21 Tonys.
Prince's works often feature ground-breaking and dramatic material for the Broadway musical, often considered a popular and comedic form. These include: West Side Story, whose story introduced gang violence and racial conflict to the genre; Cabaret, which dramatized the rise of the Nazis in Berlin; and Sweeney Todd, a tragicomedy that brings rape, murder, and cannibalism to the Broadway stage. His penchant for heavy subject matter and his unconventional style reached perhaps its pinnacle in his collaboration with Stephen Sondheim.
Parade is Prince's third work to deal directly with antisemitism, following Fiddler on the Roof and Cabaret; Cabaret was revived in 1998, the same year Parade opened. Alfred Uhry credits Prince with the decision to write Leo Frank's story as a musical. He said in an interview:
Hal Prince, who I knew, was talking about, "Why do you think the Atlanta Jews were so desperate to try to look like Christians?" I said, "Well the Leo Frank case, I don't know." He said "I know about it, but I don't really know about it," so I told him just the outlines of it and he said "That's a musical." Pretty soon he got me Jason and we were off to the races.
While Uhry and Brown did the writing, Prince helped to structurally and thematically shape the piece, including making the decision to begin the show during the American Civil War. He also helped make decisions about keeping or cutting songs in the work.