NEITHER FOOLS NOR COWARDS
Michael Arden is a Renaissance artist. He approaches his work with a humanist curiosity, an intricate yet organic perfectionism, and a keen eye for composition, movement, and light. He’s a two-time Tony Award-winning director, the first of which was for his 2023 Broadway revival of Parade. This production is now on tour and has landed at the Ahmanson in Los Angeles, with several of the original cast members.
The National Touring Company of PARADE
Parade is a true story shrouded in tragedy. Hope and heroism course through its veins. Leo Frank (Max Chernin) is at the center, a stoic Jewish man from New York living in Georgia with his industrious wife Lucille (Talia Suskauer) in the early 20th century. Leo is spuriously accused of, and indicted for, murdering a young girl. His imprisonment derails his marriage, galvanizes their conservative Southern community, and eventually garners national attention. The story outlines an ominous presence which we come to recognize as antisemitism, whipped into a frenzy by an unscrupulous and unabashedly racist prosecutor, Hugh Dorsey (Andrew Samonsky).
Talia Suskauer and Max Chernin
Throughout the show, there’s a progressively suffocating suppression of charity and equity. We watch, helpless, as a maddening web of lies is concocted to ensnare Leo, with seemingly the whole town complicit. Lucille stands as the lone force of righteousness and courage. Once she’s able to convince the gutless governor (Chris Shyer) to reopen the case, the tower of deceit begins to topple, revealing a path of salvation for her husband.
Chris Shyer (center) and company
This is Jason Robert Brown at his best. The score (conducted by Charlie Alterman) is a profusion of musical artistry and storytelling, a masterclass in harmonic eloquence. Cacophony is deftly wielded; at key points, two musical worlds collide, independent compositions overlapping each other, illustrating the clash of cultures and objectives. Alfred Uhry’s book leaves nothing to be desired; the plot and dialogue flow effortlessly, seamlessly.
Danielle Lee Greaves and Talia Suskauer
The casting team wrangled an impressive, and impressively large, cast. There are no stand-outs, meaning the cast is impeccably calibrated, each performer equal in strength. The design team, too, exemplifies artistic collaboration—atmospheric lighting (Heather Gilbert), period-perfect costuming (Susan Hilferty, Mark Koss) and hair (Tom Watson), pristine sound design (Jon Weston). The set (Dane Laffrey) is a stage within a stage, perching the inactive characters in rows of seats along either side as guilty bystanders and partial jurors. Archival photographs of the actual people are projected behind the performers (Sven Ortel), keeping us grounded in reality. Overall, the production is a magnificent clockwork.
Bailee Endebrock, Sophia Manicone and Emily Rose DeMartino
And that is its only flaw. What’s missing is the mess, the grit, the shrapnel. The reverberations of Leo Frank’s calamitous fate reach us even today. Injustice, especially one this abominable, is rightly nauseating. Antisemitism is one of the oldest and most enduring plagues on humanity. Yet, the grime and rot have been polished away in this production. The anguish and derangement that would appropriately corrode and crack the psyche never fully manifest in our leads. The real life atrocity has been turned into a ballet—a sanitized, gilded portrayal of a gruesome slice of history.
The National Touring Company of PARADE
To right the wrongs of yesterday, to prevent the horrors of the past from repeating themselves, we must confront them directly. We’ll grimace at the sight and smell, our stomachs will turn and our hearts will collapse—exactly what needs to happen to actualize progress and justice. Parade is a work written to do just that. But this production, albeit an elegant display of Arden’s directorial maturity and finesse, is inconspicuously missing the stains of dirt and blood. It’s tender, aesthetic, restrained, but it falls short of justly telling Leo’s story.
Trevor James and company
In Act II, Lucille accuses the governor of being either a fool or a coward for turning a blind eye. Parade is a musical that implores us, as Lucille did, to look at what happens when we stop thinking as an “us” and turn others into a “them”, when we let mild bigotry fester into vile hatred, when we shirk our social responsibility for each other. It reminds us that we are neither fools nor cowards and that the lives of innocent victims are in our hands. We should all be so lucky to have a Lucille fighting for us “when the flood comes”. Parade at the Ahmanson is a Tony-level production worth seeing, theatre at its finest. Just be sure to look past the beautiful brush strokes to find the still-aching heart of a very real Leo Frank.
Michael Tacconi
photos by Joan Marcus
Parade
national tour
ends on July 12, 2025 at Los Angeles’s Ahmanson Theatre
for tickets (starting at $40.25), visit CTG
tour continues; for cities and dates, visit Parade
for more shows, visit Theatre in LA
