Review: PARADE at Kauffman Theatre

The touring company of PARADE, now playing at the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts, recounts the sad, but true tale of Leo Frank and Mary Phagan. Mr. Frank was almost certainly falsely convicted of Ms. Phagan’s April 27, 1913 murder due to an early twentieth century eruption of rampant antisemitism.

This is a super production of a perhaps slightly flawed show.  Starring are an excellent Max Chernin as Leo Frank and an as good Talia Suskauer as Lucille Frank. Chernin comes direct from working as Ben Platt’s understudy in the Broadway production. Suskauer was last seen as Elphaba in the Broadway company of “Wicked.”  Both are tremendous performers.  Chernin is easily one of the best male stage voices I’ve heard in many years.

This entire company tells a tough story with remarkable sensitivity and professionalism.

PARADE originally opened on Broadway in 1998 with a book by Albert Uhry and a score by Jason Robert Brown.  The original production earned Tony Awards for both Uhry and Brown.

Albert Uhry is best known as the creator of “The Last Night of Ballyhoo” and “Driving Miss Daisy.” Along with PARADE, the three plays are known as Uhry’s “Atlanta Trilogy.” All three works deal with some level of Uhry’s own Southern Jewish background. He has earned two Tony Awards.

Jason Robert Brown is known for PARADE, “The Bridges of Madison County” and “The Last Five Years.” He also wrote the music for “Mr. Saturday Night” and is said to be working on music for the upcoming “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.”

PARADE was revived in 2023 and earned the 2024 Tony for Best Revival of a Musical.  This is the initial tour of the Tony winning Revival.   

The real Leo Frank was a Jewish-American businessman who operated a pencil manufacturing firm in Atlanta Georgia.  Mary Phagan was a white thirteen-year-old employee of the firm.  On the day previous to her murder, Ms. Phagan visited the factory office to personally collect her week’s pay envelope from Mr. Frank.

Leo was an exceptionally hard worker.  Confederate Memorial Day was a holiday marked by general business closures.  Frank was in his office mainly to catch up on work.  Wife Lucille had been looking forward to a traditional picnic.  It was only Leo’s work ethic that led to his eventual conviction and death.

Phagan’s body was discovered at 3:00 a.m. the next morning secreted in a basement area of the factory building.  The crime coincided with Confederate Memorial Day in Atlanta. Still in 1913, the Confederate States’ defeat in the Civil War had left a bitter taste in the mouths of many still living veterans of that conflict. 

Many Jews in the South prior to World War I had been successful in business.  The Jewish community of Atlanta had been assimilated into the wider Atlanta community.  Leo Frank had lived in Atlanta only four years. 

Born in Texas, but raised in a borough of New York City, Frank had married into one of the Southern Jewish families.  All it took was an accusation and a political power play for Frank to be accused and condemned for Phagan’s murder. 

Mobs surrounded the Fulton County Courthouse screaming for Frank’s head continuously during the thirty-day trial.  The jury was forced to enter and leave the courthouse through January 6-like crowds. A political opponent of the prosecutor threatened with an accusation that the police had been bought off by monied Jewish interests if Frank was not convicted.  Leo Frank never had a real chance.

The trial judge made a public statement doubting Frank’s guilt before condemning him to hang.  The Georgia Governor eventually commuted Leo Frank’s sentence to life in prison before finishing his term and leaving the state for good.

Life in prison was not good enough for the Georgia power structure at that time.  A vigilance committee of twenty-eight well known citizens carefully planned to break Leo Frank out of the prison, drag him eighty miles to near Mary Phagan’s hometown, and execute him publicly. They even had the audacity to photograph and film themselves in the act. The mob was not identified by name until 2000.

It is a sad coincidence that Monday, January 27, 2025 marks the eightieth anniversary of the liberation of the emaciated survivors of the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz Poland.

On Sunday of this week, anti-Israel protestors gathered in front of Oheb Shalom Congregation in South Orange New Jersey and sprayed graffiti on the Synagogue’s driveway.  AntiSemitisim continues to periodically rear its ugly head.

Leo’s execution led to the creation of the Anti-Defamation-League and the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan that had previously been dispersed during the Grant Administration.

PARADE is worth seeing.  It is an emotional powerhouse.  It continues at the Kauffman Center through Sunday, February 2.  Tickets are available at The American Theatre Guild website.

Photos by Joan Marcus

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