It’s 1998, and you’re one of the lucky few to catch Parade during its short run at Lincoln Center Theater. You’ve heard good things about the score by a talented young composer, Jason Robert Brown, but you’re a bit apprehensive about the show’s subject matter. You’re settling in for an evening that will explore a rape and murder in Atlanta, the trial of the falsely accused Leo Frank, and the antisemitism-fueled lynching after Frank’s death sentence is commuted to life in prison. “So why is it called Parade?,” you ask as you flip through the Playbill before it starts. That question is soon answered. The lights come up on a Confederate soldier singing to his unseen sweetheart before he leaves to fight in the Civil War. As he leaves, the scene transforms into a Confederate Memorial Day parade fifty years later (1913). The soldier, now an old man, again sings with pride about the community he fought to protect as the chorus sings along and Confederate flags wave (“The Old Red Hills of Home”). It’s a glorious rousing song, which makes its sentiment all the more chilling. This is the Atlanta Leo Frank, a New York Jew, lives in, and he will learn first hand the lengths to which they will go in order to preserve their delusions of pre-Reformation glory.
