Pulling a Sondheim—sans Sondheim.
Tough trick.
Hate, revenge, injustice, murder—themes that, traditionally, only the maestro makes into musicals of madness such as Assassins and Sweeney Todd. And even he turned down an offer to score the darker-than-dark Parade, the tuneful retelling of the rape and murder of 13-year-old pencil factory worker Mary Phagan in 1913 Atlanta, and the anti-Semitism, judicial corruption and grossly misplaced Confederate pride that framed Jewish, Brooklyn-born factory owner Leo Frank, who swung from a rope for a crime he didn't commit—and for which he was pardoned only 20 years ago.
Alfred Uhry's compelling book, expertly advanced by Jason Robert Brown's score (both 2000 Tony winners) are treated to a mesmerizing, all-too-brief CCSN production that will nonetheless stay with you for days, weeks, even months.
Parade, for all its narrative blackness and human ugliness, also traces a remarkable love story and an act of political courage (the governor's commuting of Frank's sentence, which wrecked his public career), all doused with the fascination of historical truth.
Assisted by a live orchestra and Yale Yeandel's beautifully evocative sets rolling on and off with almost balletic precision (including the tree that looms as an invitation to a hanging), Director Doug Baker, blocking the stage and his actors to near-perfection, has drawn masterful performances out of a cast with sterling vocal prowess (though the high-decibel-bordering-on-distorted sound system was a bone-rattler).
When little Mary's (Alexis Christian) body is discovered in the office of Leo Frank (Joey DeBenedetto), the factory owner—an aloof Northern Jew who doesn't conceal his disdain for the Georgians who treat him like a hated interloper in their Christian, Confederate haven—is immediately taken into custody, triggering a snowballing conspiracy to convict, built more out of bigotry than evidence. And as the trial—rigged with factory-worker "witnesses" coached by ruthlessly ambitious prosecutor Hugh Dorsey (Eric Torres)—barrels toward a guilty verdict, Leo's Jewish, Southern-belle wife Lucille (Meg Osborne) desperately tries to save him from the hangman's noose while falling more deeply in love with her husband than she ever thought possible.
DeBenedetto gives one of the season's most humane, complex performances as a man who's both a tragic victim and a bit of a prig who learns how to find comfort in one other person as the world rallies against him. To watch his exceedingly mature work, then learn that DeBenedetto is a teenage student at Las Vegas Academy, is to be stunned. And while he sows our sympathy thoroughly, in one chilling number, "Come Up to My Office"—in which the false testimony of the factory girls that Frank is an insidious sexual predator is acted out in flashback—DeBenedetto is terrifying, embodying exactly what everyone in Atlanta is convinced he is.
His feat is especially notable in that he teams with the equally impressive Osborne, an actress who has appeared in national tours. The pair believably evolve from a pro forma relationship (their marriage was believed to have been arranged) to an eternally bonded couple. (Even after an enraged mob defied the governor's commuted sentence of life in prison and carried out the jury's death sentence by dragging her husband from his cell and hanging him, his wife still went by the name of Lucille Frank.)
Among a raft of strong supporting performances, a nearly possessed Carlos Mathis-Johnson stands out as John Conley, the state's star witness, who lies on the stand (in the enthrallingly evil number, "That's What He Said") that he saw Frank commit the deed—and whom, decades later, evidence points to as Mary Phagan's true killer.