Go: ‘Parade’: The Law, Lynching and Los Angeles

You might think of marching bands, bright colors and celebrations when you hear the word “parade,” and when you think of musicals, you might think of flashy costumes and rousing big dance numbers, but the award-winning musical “Parade” (currently at the Ahmanson until 12 July 2025) subverts all of that. The parade in question takes place on Confederate Memorial Day in Georgia during the 1910s.

In Georgia, the Confederate Memorial Day has been recognized in 1874 as the fourth Monday of April and the musical reminds us that the American Civil War (1861-1865) wasn’t so far in the distant past.

A young soldier (Jake Ziman) bids farewell to his sweetheart, leaving Marietta, Georgia for the Civil War. Then flashing forward to 1913, that soldier is now a one-legged veteran (Evan Harrington) preparing to march in the annual Confederate Memorial Day parade (“The Old Red Hills of Home”). Marietta is a city northwest of Atlanta and, according to Google Maps, a 35-minute drive by a modern car.

While the Georgia-born and raised Lucille (Talia Suskauer) expects to enjoy the holiday with a picnic, her husband, the Brooklyn-born Leo Frank (Max Chernin), intends to go into work at the pencil factory. She chides him for using a Yiddish word because although she also is Jewish, Georgian Jews are more assimilated.

Also heading to the pencil factory is the ill-fated 13-year-old Mary Phagan (Olivia Goosman) who first with a young man, Frankie Epps (Trevor James), who wants to take her to the picture show. Mary insists that her mother won’t let her go because she’s too young.

Mary meets Leo and picks up her pay but she never returns home. That night, the police come to the Frank house and wake up Leo. Leo is taken to the scene where Mary was found, raped and murdered. Although the police initially suspect the African American night watchman, Newt Lee (Jerquintez A. Gipson), Newt redirects attention to Leo. Leo is arrested and charged.

That’s when we meet the real villains of this political parade. A reporter Britt Craig (Michael Tacconi) gets wind of the murder and thinks this might be his big break. Under the editor of “The Jeffersonian,” Tom Watson (Griffin Binnicker), the coverage is sensational and slanted. A local prosecutor with political ambitions, Hugh Dorsey (Andrew Samonsky), doesn’t see how convicting Newt would help his career and focuses on Leo. The evidence is manufactured and Leo is found guilty and sentenced to be hung.

Act II is the torturous road toward judicial justice. Suddenly, the convicted and imprisoned Leo is forced to depend upon Lucille and she proves herself formidable. She will see the governor (Chris Shyer) and the governor will follow his conscience, dooming his political future.

This is a musical that doesn’t have any melodies that have a hook and you won’t leave the theater singing or tapping your toes. You might be anguished and angry.

The large Ahmanson stage might threaten to swallow up this musical about small towns and small minds, but in the middle of the stage is a raised stage that in a parade might be taken for a float or a gazebo (scenic design by Dane Laffrey). At times, people are seated on stage on either side, witnessing the actions of the people above them. The backdrop becomes a screen which is used for informing us, taking us to a grand mansion or a courtroom and, in Act II, allows us to witness black-and-white grainy photographed scenes of the lynching (projection design by Sven Ortel).

Under the direction of Michael Arden, this New York City Center production borrows from the concepts of Thorton Wilder’s 1938 “Our Town.” And although the revival hit Broadway in 2023, in 2025, the US National Tour finds its issues lost in a new political context. The revival came out after the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” changed “Jews will not replace us,” in 2021 while Donald J. Trump was the 45th president. It brought to the forefront the question: Are Jews White?

Although in terms of publication, “Parade” was the last of Alfred Uhry’s Atlanta trilogy, it is set before the other two–”Driving Miss Daisy” (1987) and “The Last Night of Ballyhoo” (1996). Uhry who was born in Atlanta in a German Jewish family is writing about what he knows. The Atlanta plays are specifically about Jewish Americans navigating their lives in Atlanta, in a society that almost accepts them. If you do the math, you’ll know that the titular Miss Daisy was a young woman at the time of “Parade.”

“Driving Miss Daisy,” which won a Pulitzer Prize, is set in 1948. Uhry won an Oscar for the 1989 cinematic adaptation and as the titular character, Jessica Tandy won an Oscar for best actress. “The Last Night of Ballyhoo” is set in 1939 and won a Tony Award for Best Play. “Parade,” the only musical of the three and Uhry won a Tony Award for Best Book of a Musical. Jason Robert Brown won a Tony for Best Original Score.

The last time I saw the “Parade” I was more hopeful. Barack Obama was in his first year of eight as president. I thought the world might be changing, despite all the horrible comments I heard about Michelle Obama and the weird way that minor things like a beige suit became a “scandal.”

The year was 2009, and we saw the Donmar production at the Mark Taper Forum with TR Knight as Leo. At the time, Georgia was still celebrating Confederate Memorial Day.

Knight’s Leo Frank was a man being crushed, made smaller by the stress of all the attention. In this production, Chernon’s Leo is a man trying to make order out of a world in disarray, trying to be a man, trying but failing to understand Georgia and his wife.

I have never been to Georgia and in 2009, I did not reflect upon its history. In Georgia, the last lynching was in 1946. According to “A History of Racial Injustice,” this incident has also been called “the last mass lynching in America.” One man, Roger Malcom, had been accused of stabbing a White farmer, and when his wife, Dorothy, and another African American couple, George and Mae Dorsey, came to bail them out on their way home, a group of unmasked me lynched all four at the Ford Bridge.

The last lynching in California, was in San Jose in November 1933 and not racially motivated. The 22-year-old eldest son of a prominent business was kidnaped and murdered. His alleged murderers, Thomas Harold Thurmond and John M. Holmes, were lynched by a mob.

Much has changed since 2009. Georgia’s Confederate Memorial Day was de-recognized in 2016 and now, the fourth Monday of April is called “State Holiday.”

Currently, four states (Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina and Texas) officially recognize Confederate Memorial Day as a state holiday while a few other states (Kentucky, Florida, North Carolina and Tennessee) commemorate the day.

If in 2009, Obama’s presidency seemed to be progress, the current presidential administration seems to be leaps backward, even farther back than the 45th presidency. If I had hope in 2009, I’m am struggling to see it now, only five months into the current presidential administration. What I do see is the raging hate fueled by history and unfettered by geography. This the US that inspired Nazi researchers in the 1930s. This is hate that has fused and magnified anti-Latino hate, something ever present in Southern California, but grown smaller as Latinos have moved up the socio-political ladder. Still this anti-Latino sentiment is what is burning up Los Angeles.

But was the lynching of Leo Frank all about race? Was it regionalism, too? That’s something a legal panel looked at.

The moderator of the legal panel was the David W. Burcham Chair of the Ethical Advocacy at Loyola Law School, Professor Laurie Levenson. She is also the director of the Loyal Center of Ethical Advocacy. She is the founding director of the Loyola Project for Innocent. She received her AB from Stanford and her JD from UCLA, School of Law. Most of the discussion was by author Steve Oney who wrote “And the Dead Shall Rise: The Murder of Mary Phagan and the Lynching of Leo Frank.” Also on the panel was Evan Harrington who plays Judge Roan and Brian Vaughn who plays Luther Rosser, the defense attorney.

The 2023 Broadway revival won Best Revival for a Musical and Best Direction of a Musical (Michael Arden). The lead actors, Ben Platt and Micaelahttps://photos.google.com/photo/AF1QipN4nTjB8D4NM2GfE7YRwdo0zwlIYpCuoQJQ-WxR Diamond were nominated for Tonys as well. With Max Chernin and Talia Suskauer leading the national tour, this production is well-worth seeing and hits differently in today’s Los Angeles and today’s US socio-political climate.

“Parade” continues until 12 July 2025 at the Ahmanson. For more information, visitCenterTheatreGroup.org.