This 'Parade' is rousing, colorful and simple as a march tune

'Parade' runs through March 30 at Belk Theater

This review by longtime Charlotte arts critic Lawrence Toppman was published by The Charlotte Ledger on March 26, 2025. You can find out more about The Charlotte Ledger’s commitment to smart local news and information and sign up for our newsletter for free here. Ledger subscribers can add the Toppman on the Arts newsletter on their “My Account” page.

Review: Parade explores justice and prejudice but leaves little room for subtlety

The 2023 Broadway revival of “Parade,” which earned a Tony for best revival of a musical, led to the tour that’s at Belk Theater through Sunday. (Photo courtesy of Blumenthal Arts)

by Lawrence Toppman

The most thoughtful moment in “Parade,” a musical with too few of them, comes at the start of Act 2. Factory superintendent Leo Frank has been convicted of murdering 13-year-old employee Mary Phagan, and powerful people across America are begging Georgia’s governor to commute the death sentence to life imprisonment.

Offstage, the governor frets about this decision. Onstage, two black servants sing sardonically about his dilemma in “A Rumblin’ and a Rollin’.” Nobody would be up in arms, they say, about a murdered girl if she were Black. Nobody has swamped the governor with appeals to prevent the lynching of Black men in 1915. (Georgia led the nation that year with 18, about 26 percent of the U.S. total.) So why all the fuss over one Caucasian? Now white people know what African-Americans have dealt with for years.

That kind of fresh approach crops up too seldom in this agitprop story. Jason Robert Brown deserved his 1999 Tony for best score; his deep and varied palette runs from chain-gang work songs to ballroom dances. The cast of the national tour, led by strong-voiced Max Chernin and Talia Suskauer as Leo and stalwart wife Lucille, deliver the goods. Michael Arden’s free-flowing direction keeps the pacing smooth.

Yet Alfred Uhry’s book hammers home its points and populates the courtroom with hissable villains: the openly smarmy district attorney, the obviously perjured and nearly hypnotized witnesses, the incompetent blowhard of a defense attorney. The trial scene in “To Kill a Mockingbird” looks like a marvel of legal jurisprudence by comparison.

The smirking, alcoholic member of the yellow press and the Bible-waving Christian babbling about Armageddon and belching anti-Semitic insults — here a dead ringer for J.D. Vance — finally had my eyes rolling back into my head. To be fair, Tony voters disagreed with me and chose Uhry’s book, too. But were they rewarding intention or execution?

The show did a little better in the Broadway revival of 2023, which led to this tour; it won a Tony for best revival of a musical and doubled the 85 performances of the original run. But it will always be a hard nut for people who want lighter fare: We find out in the opening moments that a mob snatched Frank from prison and hanged him. Every moment of hope, respite and brief triumph will be refracted through the darkness of his eventual lynching.

The show doesn’t lionize Frank. He’s innocent, which pretty much everyone now believes 110 years after his death, but he’s also stubborn, priggish, slow to recognize reality and consistently underestimating his wife. Anti-Semitism plays a part in his persecution, yet he’s “the other” in many ways, both a relatively wealthy man who employs child labor and a Northerner whom Atlantans see as a predatory carpetbagger. The opening sequence, in which a Confederate soldier sings in 1863 of “The Old Red Hills of Home,” seems scarcely relevant, until you realize the mob’s repugnance toward Frank 50 years later may be less religious than geographic.

Uhry doesn’t name a murderer, and his abridged trial doesn’t explore the defense’s real-life contention that Black janitor Jim Conley committed the crime. Conley struts through the musical, lying on the stand and continuing to lie even when the governor drops by a chain gang to review his evidence. (There, as at other times, the play enters the realm of fantasy.)

Ramone Nelson swaggers and sings powerfully as Conley, leading a supporting cast in which most actors tackle multiple roles and many have at least part of one memorable song. Jack Roden also stands out as Frankie, Mary’s would-be boyfriend and one of the first people to lie about Frank. He turns up in the last scene dressed as a World War I doughboy, singing about those “old red hills of home” as if going off to re-fight the Civil War. A century later, you can still see the faces of his descendants behind every display of a Confederate battle flag.

If You’re Going: “Parade” runs through March 30 at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday-Thursday, 8 p.m. Friday, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturday and 1:30 and 7 p.m. Sunday.

Lawrence Toppman covered the arts for 40 years at The Charlotte Observer before retiring in 2020. Now, he’s back in the critic’s chair for the Charlotte Ledger — look for his reviews about two times each month in the Charlotte Ledger.

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