Review: No One Should Pass by Emerson Colonial Theatre's PARADE

The musical “Parade,” the story of the 1913 trial and imprisonment, and 1915 hanging, of Jewish American Leo Frank, feels all too chillingly relevant today.

With book by Alfred Uhry (“Driving Miss Daisy”) and music and lyrics by Jason Robert Brown (“The Last Five Years”), and co-conceived and under the direction of Harold Prince, the show’s original Broadway production opened at the Vivian Beaumont Theatre at Lincoln Center on December 17, 1998, and closed on February 2, 1999. It went on to win that year’s Tony Awards for Best Book and Best Original Score.

A 2023 City Center revival and subsequent Broadway transfer, incorporating changes made by  director Rob Ashford in his 2007 production at The Donmar Warehouse in London, played a limited run from March 16 to August 17 at New York’s Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre. That mounting, which won the 2023 Tony Awards for Best Revival of a Musical and Best Direction of a Musical for Michael Arden, spawned the moving, first-rate national tour now at Boston’s Emerson Colonial Theatre through March 23.

Director Arden – whose work is currently represented on Broadway by the imaginative new musical “Maybe Happy Ending,” and was seen last summer in the pre-Broadway tryout of “The Queen of Versailles” at the Emerson Colonial – makes expert use of a large and versatile cast to tell the ultimately intimate story of the devastating impact of a Southern community’s longstanding antisemitism, prejudice, and racism on a young Jewish couple.

The story opens in the early 1860s in Marietta, Georgia, when the nation was engulfed in the Civil War that pitted the South against the North (“The Old Red Hills of Home”). Jump ahead 50 years to 1913 and while the Union won, many Southerners are still unwilling to accept that truth. Indeed, they’re throwing a Confederate Memorial Day parade. It’s on this day that a 13-year-old girl named Mary Phagan (a sweet-faced Olivia Goosman) is murdered, and Leo Frank (a stolid Max Chernin), a supervisor at an Atlanta pencil factory where Mary works, is accused of the crime. At the ensuing trial, when fabricated testimony is presented against Leo, and with acrid antisemitism in the air, he is found guilty.

Leo’s wife Lucille (a determined Talia Suskauer) stands strong during the trial (“You Don’t Know This Man”) and later, with the governor’s help, disproves the accusations. The death sentence is commuted to life in prison, but townsfolk, desperate for vengeance and stoked by deep-rooted bigotry, refuse to accept that and lynch Leo.

Chernin and Suskauer’s supple voices add tender and wrenching emotion to Brown’s beautifully written duets for the Franks, including “Leo at Work,” “What Am I Waiting For?” “This Is Not Over Yet,” and “All the Wasted Time.”  Music director and conductor Charlie Alterman leads a nine-piece orchestra fluidly throughout.

Providing solid supporting work are Andrew Samonsky as sinister prosecutor Hugh Dorsey, Griffin Binnicker as extreme right-wing newspaperman Thomas Watson, and Chris Shyer as Governor Staton, who comes to believe Leo was set up. Also strong are Jack Roden as Frankie Epps, a boy enamored of Mary (“There Is a Fountain,” “It Don’t Make Sense”), and the sonorous voiced Ramone Nelson as Jim Conley, an ex-convict willing to fabricate stories that falsely implicate Leo (“That’s What He Said”).

Dane Laffrey’s set is dominated by a raised box at center stage that serves as everything from a parade stand to the Franks’ home, the courtroom, the governor’s ballroom, Leo’s cell, and the site of his lynching. Most of the cast is onstage much of the time, surrounding the box and creating a sense of small-town claustrophobia. The staging is enhanced by lighting designer Heather Gilbert, and period-appropriate costumes by Arlington native Susan Hilferty and Mark Koss.

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