Alfred Uhry has seen quite a bit in his 88 years, however his musical “Parade” resides inside a renewed resonance he says is nice for the fabric, but not nice for the world.
“It’s interesting because the first production was during President Bill Clinton’s years, and it wasn’t as prescient as it is now,” Uhry mentioned. “If a person is in the minority, be it Black or Jewish or Asian, it’s even more dangerous now that it was 25 years ago, and so it speaks to people.”
“Parade” is the true story of Leo Frank, a Jewish superintendent of an Atlanta pencil manufacturing unit. His conviction for the rape and homicide of a kid worker, 13-year-old Mary Phagan in 1913, is extensively thought-about unjust, largely attributed to a biased trial and antisemitism. Two years later in 1915, Frank was kidnapped by armed males and lynched in Phagan’s hometown of Marietta, Georgia. The confluence of these occasions despatched the nation on a extra reviled path, which included reviving the Ku Klux Klan.
The musical, which received a 2023 Tony for finest revival, runs at BroadwaySF’s Orpheum Theatre by way of June 8.
In 1998, the unique manufacturing garnered Uhry and composer Jason Robert Brown Tony Awards for finest e book of a musical and finest rating, respectively. But the manufacturing struggled to seek out an viewers, operating for simply over two months earlier than closing in February of 1999.
By then, Uhry had earned the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for 1988’s “Driving Miss Daisy,” and the 1997 finest play Tony award for “The Last Night of Ballyhoo,” the primary two performs in his “Atlanta Trilogy.” Directing “Parade” was theater legend Harold Prince, however with Stephen Sondheim having turned the undertaking down, Prince talked about a younger composer who was working together with his daughter Daisy on an off-Broadway present. Brown’s youth at 23 and lack of a Broadway pedigree had been issues Uhry discovered scary, however these fears had been settled when Brown shared the primary two songs with Uhry.
“I can’t imagine ever having a better collaborator for this than Jason. I was just lucky.”
Uhry discovered shortly that Brown’s abilities had been formidable, with skills to manifest Uhry’s ardour for the South into sound and tune.
“I remember telling him that every time I went back to see my family after I started living in New York, I was really moved when we started to land at the airport by the side of the red clay hills, which told me I was back home again,” Uhry mentioned. “There was something on Mary Phagan’s tombstone about the red hills of Georgia, and he seemed to understand there was pride in where you come from. To top it all off, he wrote beautiful love songs.”
These songs had been at first a window into the soul and motivations of Frank, the embattled protagonist.
“I firmly believe that in a show like this, music is like costumes, because it has to both explain the character and also not betray the character,” Brown mentioned. “The fact that it’s 1913 in the South, and we’re talking about a pencil factory and about a Jewish man and his wife who are sort of lightly assimilated into the community, I felt like those are a lot of rules, and I like having those boundaries.”
The restrictive atmosphere offered formidable challenges, which included writing songs for a considerably reticent character equivalent to Leo Frank, who will not be notably emotive. But Brown leaned into these challenges, permitting Frank’s pure expressions to peek by way of his personal private clouds.
“By the middle of the second act, this very buttoned up person has become much more emotional and connected, so how can I have him sing and still allow him to have room to open up as the show goes on?” Brown requested. “That was the challenge, and one of the ways was to have him sort of be funny and look through the lens of someone very distant from it. As he gets deeper and deeper into his own circumstance, he has to dig inside himself and not just view it with ironic distance, but actually open his heart.”
With a lot of the present surrounding the crippling circumstances of Leo and Lucille Frank, Uhry finds a small morsel of knowledge contained in the couple’s open coronary heart, a lesson for society as a complete.
“In their case, I think what I would say is they did the best they could under the circumstance, and in life, that’s really all we can do.”
David John Chávez is chair of the American Theatre Critics/Journalists Affiliation and a two-time juror for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama (‘22-‘23); @davidjchavez.bsky.social.
‘PARADE’
Guide by Alfred Uhry, music and lyrics by Jason Robert Brown, offered by BroadwaySF
By: June 8
The place: Orpheum Theatre, 1192 Market St., San Francisco
Operating time: 2 hours, half-hour with an intermission
Tickets: $70-$239; broadwaysf.com
