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Parade, the multiple Tony award-winning 1998 musical whose traveling revival comes to the Smith Center for eight performances June 10 through 15, tells the true story of Leo Frank, a Brooklyn transplant accused of the murder of a young factory worker, Mary Phagan, in 1913 Georgia. The fallout from the case was extensive, stoking an inferno of antisemitism, reshaping state government, and activating two diametrically opposed organizations that still exist today: the Anti-Defamation League and, sadly, a revived Ku Klux Klan.
With a book by Driving Miss Daisy’s Alfred Uhry, original direction by musical theater legend Harold "Hal" Prince (Cabaret, Sweeney Todd) and Tony-recognized music and lyrics from Jason Robert Brown, Parade gives a warmth, beauty and humanity to this tragic story that resonates even more strongly some 27 years after the show made its Broadway debut. Brown spoke with the Weekly on the eve of two Smith Center visits—the Vegas premiere of the Michael Arden-directed revival of Parade, and An Evening with Jason Robert Brown at Myron’s on June 28—and gave his perspective on this powerful, very contemporary American work.
What drew you to Parade? What was it about this story that that interested you?
I was only 24 when they approached me about doing this. I had already started working on a different piece based on The Wrong Man, a Hitchcock movie starring Henry Fonda in 1956. I had seen that movie, and I wanted to turn that into a musical, and I'm glad I didn't for a number of reasons. But clearly there was something on my mind about, what was the drama of being unjustly accused? What did it mean to be someone in that position? I think there were all sorts of things about my own identity and my own identifying as a kind of outsider, as someone who never felt very comfortable in the world that he was in, when they talked to me about the story of Parade. I hadn't known the Leo Frank story before they approached me, but once they started explaining what it was and I started doing my research, it felt like a story I was supposed to be telling, which is I now know a very rare gift.
Which element of the story spoke most strongly to you?
I mean, on the first and most primal level, I just I knew what it was supposed to sound like. I knew what Atlanta in 1913 was supposed to sound like, what it felt like in that kind of post-Civil War, Industrial Revolution South.
And thematically, again, just these ideas of, how do we respond to the outsider in our midst, and how do we respond to being the outsider? Those things … really animated me, and I think they still animate me. That's still sort of a lot of what I write about.
The music and lyrics of Parade is beautiful and, in many cases, catchy, which makes it tough to hear characters spouting racist views. Did you struggle with giving a captivating voice to, well, villains?
I mean, for me, I don't think villains sing—by which I mean that I wouldn't know how to write a song for someone who had evil intentions. I think that song would sound stupid. I have to really believe that those characters believe something to be good. They believe it to be true to them, something that they think is for a common good, or at least something that will really make life better. So, I never approached as this is what the bad guys sing, and this is what the good guys sing. For me, everybody just has their own sort of weird little corner of the story, and I obviously don't agree with the viewpoints of some of the people. … I just have to write what I honestly felt was in their hearts, and what they were feeling. And that's musical, as well as lyrical. …
Alfred always said he feels like everyone in the show is a victim, that it's not enough to sort of say, “oh, poor Mary Phagan” or “poor Leo Frank.” You have to look at the way these people were manipulated by the system, were manipulated by the sort of myth of what America is. And when you look at them that way, you know they're all just operating in this place of, “How do we make it right? How do we make this thing right that feels so terribly wrong?”
They were all steeped in a certain culture, and behaved accordingly within its parameters.
And still are. Yeah.
When you wrote Parade, did you imagine … did you fear that it would become more emotionally relevant with time?
When we opened the show in 1998 a lot of people were like, why bring up all this history? This is behind us. And it was during the Clinton administration, sort of the golden era for Jews in a lot of respects. Why do we have to go dwelling in all this messy history? You know, this is no fun. We want to see musicals that are fun. [But] I don't write musicals because I think they're supposed to be toe-tapping. I write musicals because that's how I tell stories, and this was a story that I wanted to tell. But I think what I couldn't have anticipated is that by the time 2022 rolled around, it no longer felt like irrelevant history. … This is a show about America. It's not about America in 1913, and it's certainly not about one town in America. This is the river that runs underneath this country, this river of tribalism and hatred.
I was 53 when [Parade] got to Broadway a second time. And I felt very lucky to have written this show when I was so much younger. I felt like Alfred [Uhry], Hal [Prince] and I had given the future a gift by taking this thing that maybe wasn't ready to be born into the world in 1998 but took those 25 years to crack open and fly.
You feel that the parallels between Atlanta, 1913 and America 2025 are clear and direct.
I mean, I think it's more direct than I would even like. In a lot of ways, I would like Parade to be sort of seen as, right, this kind of tribalism, this need to blame the outsider, that is part of the American stew. But what I did not expect, and what I still am so uncomfortable with, is just how virulent antisemitism has become and how it seems to have borne fruit in all sorts of terrible ways in the last nine years. I mean, I don't need to be coy about it. There are things that happened the minute that the Trump administration first took office that said, it's now open season on Jews. We can use them for our own ends, but also, we can vilify them. And they can be the victims they deserve to be.
It's enormously unsettling. And I don't think Leo Frank is even the perfect case example for this, because Leo Frank was not a perfect person, and I don't think he was even an especially likable person, if I had to make a guess. But I think that the torrent of antisemitism that surrounded his arrest, his trial, his conviction, his murder—I think that it’s all too evident in 2025. It's amazing to me that it is, but it is.
Vegas is fortunate to receive Parade within weeks of your cabaret show at Myron’s. Can you give us a little preview of that show?
You know, I've never gotten to play Vegas in all these years. I used to do industrial shows that would play at the Thomas & Mack, but I never got to do a concert there of my own. I love the town, and I know it's a theater town, and it's exciting to be playing there after Parade is there. I've got an extraordinary singer coming with me named Alysha Umphress, who did this fantastic job in On the Town on Broadway a couple of years ago and is just a fantastic stylist. But it’s a very modest night. I'm gonna play the piano; we're gonna sing a bunch of songs. It's stuff from all through my career, and it's really a way for me to connect personally with that audience in Vegas that I've never gotten to connect to directly. I’m really excited about the opportunity to do it. I'm going to bring all the hits, but also a bunch of new stuff; I've got three new musicals that are in progress now, and we do stuff from all three of those. And, you know, my usual sort of destroying helpless pianos, which I've been doing all over the world for 30 years now.
[Laughs] We’ve got plenty. You just take out as many as you need to. What do you hope audiences take from Parade today?
I don't know that I think that way. I mean, I get asked that question a lot, and I understand why I get asked it. But for a musician, music works on a lot of levels at once. And I think the story of Parade, through its music, there's a lot of stories to be told and a lot of facets to it. I just think it's worthy of hearing those stories. I think it's worthy of listening. And there's, I mean, without tooting my own horn in some weird way, I think there's a lot of depth and a lot of richness to what we all were able to do with Parade. And I think if you love the theater, there's a lot to love. It's why I got into the theater in the first place—to be able to tell a story on this many levels, with this much depth, in a way that only music can do.
PARADE June 10-15, times vary, $35-$173. Reynolds Hall, thesmithcenter.com.
AN EVENING WITH JASON ROBERT BROWN June 28, 7 p.m., $45-$75. Myron's, thesmithcenter.com.
English (US) ·