Thursday, January 23, 2025
And it was a musical!
We went to see Parade tonight at the Orpheum. It was part of the series, and I had not given it any thought prior to waking up at 4am and not being able to get back to sleep. I assumed it was about a parade. I was very surprised to learn it was about a murder in Marietta, GA, in 1913, for which a Jewish man named Leo Frank was unfairly tried, convicted, and sentenced to death. Eventually, the governor commuted the death sentence to life in prison, but people didn’t like that, so they lynched him.
And it was a musical!
Huh.
I subbed in 6th grade social studies today and we are learning about the civil war. Talking about slavery led me to think all day about Jim Crow laws and lynching and the fact that I was going to a musical about a lynching tonight. Leo Frank was not black (and there is reference by those who railroaded him that hanging another black man for this type of crime wouldn’t be much; they went after a white Jew instead). I wasn’t sure I wanted to go, but I did because how would it be? What would it be?
The cast was filled with powerful singers. Leo’s wife played Elphaba on Broadway, so that gives you an idea of her soaring register. Leo was Leo on Broadway, so he did just fine. The murder victim, 13-year-old Mary Phagan, was perfect – in her first national tour (she is not 13 in real life). The set was really interesting. The orchestra was in back, behind a scrim, but everything else was all on stage all the time, with people transforming a raised platform into multiple locations with the addition of a chair or a blanket.
The playwright (who also wrote Driving Miss Daisy) was related to the people who owned the pencil factory where Leo and Mary worked. He grew up hearing hushed whispers about Mr. Frank and eventually learned the story as an adult. Leo Frank was given a posthumous pardon in 1987 and his case (or is it Mary’s case?) was reopened in 2019. It is ongoing.