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shrimpchipsssI was really lucky to watch the limited revival run of Parade this year with my friend who flew across the country specifically to see it live.
Parade takes place in Marietta, Georgia 50 years after the American Civil War and is about Leo Frank, a Jewish man who is accused of raping and killing his young employee, the spectacle of the court case and his wife’s efforts to help him, and the case’s aftermath in the community and the South.
This one is heavy as far as musicals go and it's suffused, and really quite blatant with the reality of antiblack racism and Jim Crow in the post-Civil War South, as well as antisemitism and the way marginalized people are pitted against each other (for example, Black characters who are blackmailed into false testimony, and what choice do they have?).
One of the things about this show, especially the incredible, awful opening number The Old Red Hills of Home, is the way the music simultaneously soars and is menacing in its soaring, and is interspersed with a honestly demented sounding classic American marching band tune. You know, the kind you’d hear in a parade. My friend talked about how the opening number had always been her favorite song but seeing the way it’s not simply a heartbreakingly beautiful song about your home but that it’s being sung by a Confederate soldier, that the song is about the total dissonance of American patriotism changed the meaning of the song for her.
And in a nutshell that is what Parade is about: the way the South has this wretched history and they haven’t dealt with it, and so you need a scapegoat that you can crucify while calling yourself pure and good and an upholder of justice. I gave this summary to coworkers in a meeting the next Monday and my cool older lesbian coworker who is from Atlanta was like yup you summed it up.
Doesn’t it just make you want to scream? Well you’ve got a whole musical soundtrack to do it to if you want.
The way the story ends is the way history goes: Leo Frank is kidnapped from prison and lynched by a mob. The antisemitism of his trial inspired the founding of the Anti-Defamation League. Frank was pardoned in 1986 and the case was reopened in 2019.
One last note, and sorry for the sudden tonal shift here, I knew nothing going into the musical other than that it was written by Jason Robert Brown who wrote the Last Five Years which I’m always yelling at people to listen to the original cast recording and not the Anna Kendrick movie, and I’ll say that man the guy knows how to write a melody.
Parade takes place in Marietta, Georgia 50 years after the American Civil War and is about Leo Frank, a Jewish man who is accused of raping and killing his young employee, the spectacle of the court case and his wife’s efforts to help him, and the case’s aftermath in the community and the South.
This one is heavy as far as musicals go and it's suffused, and really quite blatant with the reality of antiblack racism and Jim Crow in the post-Civil War South, as well as antisemitism and the way marginalized people are pitted against each other (for example, Black characters who are blackmailed into false testimony, and what choice do they have?).
One of the things about this show, especially the incredible, awful opening number The Old Red Hills of Home, is the way the music simultaneously soars and is menacing in its soaring, and is interspersed with a honestly demented sounding classic American marching band tune. You know, the kind you’d hear in a parade. My friend talked about how the opening number had always been her favorite song but seeing the way it’s not simply a heartbreakingly beautiful song about your home but that it’s being sung by a Confederate soldier, that the song is about the total dissonance of American patriotism changed the meaning of the song for her.
And in a nutshell that is what Parade is about: the way the South has this wretched history and they haven’t dealt with it, and so you need a scapegoat that you can crucify while calling yourself pure and good and an upholder of justice. I gave this summary to coworkers in a meeting the next Monday and my cool older lesbian coworker who is from Atlanta was like yup you summed it up.
Doesn’t it just make you want to scream? Well you’ve got a whole musical soundtrack to do it to if you want.
The way the story ends is the way history goes: Leo Frank is kidnapped from prison and lynched by a mob. The antisemitism of his trial inspired the founding of the Anti-Defamation League. Frank was pardoned in 1986 and the case was reopened in 2019.
One last note, and sorry for the sudden tonal shift here, I knew nothing going into the musical other than that it was written by Jason Robert Brown who wrote the Last Five Years which I’m always yelling at people to listen to the original cast recording and not the Anna Kendrick movie, and I’ll say that man the guy knows how to write a melody.
