My Thoughts on Jason Robert Brown's Parade

As Jason Robert Brown's Parade opens at Manchester's Hope Mill Theatre this week, I was invited to write the Foreword for the production's programme.

With the producers' permission, my article is reprinted below. 

It is a tremendously exciting event for Manchester's newest theatre, Hope Mill Theatre, to be staging the city’s première of Parade, a show that is both inspirational and yet deeply troubling. The musical is a complex, true and thrilling story that touches upon some of the worst aspects of humanity while celebrating a love that flourished in the most desperate of circumstances.

Jason Robert Brown’s Tony-winner kicks off during the 1913 Confederate Memorial Day Parade in Atlanta, Georgia. The Civil War had been fought (and lost) some 50 years earlier and it is the aftermath of that defeat that powers the context of this show. 

The Southern States had fought the North in a desperate, bloody struggle to hold on to their right to enslave African Americans. Slavery was (and is) de-humanising and barbaric and yet, to a majority of folk in the Confederacy, it was not only acceptable, it was desirable. Southern racism was ingrained and the Confederate flag remains a chilling emblem of the white supremacists.

As that 1913 parade passed by, Mary Phagan a white 13 year old girl from Marietta, just outside Atlanta, was brutally raped and murdered in the city’s pencil factory where she worked. Amid a hue and cry for justice, it didn't take Atlanta’s Police Department long to be conveniently pointed in the wrong direction, accusing Leo Frank, the factory superintendent. Frank may have been white, but he was a Yankee from the North and worse, a Jew. 

Parade explores how Frank was subsequently framed and how he and his wife Lucille, fought back. Child abuse and murder may not be regular subjects for a musical theatre treatment, yet from this dark core, composer Jason Robert Brown has fashioned one of the finest musicals to have emerged in the last 20 years.

Parade succeeds on so many levels. It has a finely crafted score and libretto, it's a history lesson and a towering love story. Brown won a Tony for the score; listen out for the traditional melodies of the South, carefully woven into his work. There’s Gospel, Spiritual, Blues and Swing in there, with the composer saving perhaps one of musical theatre’s finest coups for his Act One Finale. As Parade’s narrative reaches a horrendous turning point, Brown has his citizens of Atlanta launch into an exhilarating cakewalk. Where Kander and Ebb brought Cabaret’s first half to a troubling close with ‘Tomorrow Belongs To Me’, Brown’s cakewalk juxtaposes jubilation with injustice. Rarely has an array of swirling Southern petticoats and frocks been quite so stomach churning.

As a history lesson, Parade is up there with the best. The opening number ‘The Old Red Hills Of Home’ hits the audience with an unforgiving staccato percussion that soon includes a funereal chime alongside discordant strings, before evolving into a chilling yet (whisper it not) discomfortingly stirring anthem. The song is remarkable in that between its opening and closing bars, Brown tells the entire story of the South’s Civil War. A young and handsome Confederate soldier sings the opening lines, who by the song’s end is a gnarled and crippled veteran. Wounded and bitter, the old soldier dreams of the ‘lives that we led when the South land was free’. 

Brown also kicks off the second half with a punch. While Parade is famously about anti-Semitism, ‘A Rumblin’ And A Rollin’ is sung by two of the Governor of Georgia’s African American Domestic Staff, both well aware that while the Frank furore is gripping the nation, their lot hasn't significantly changed, even after the abolition of slavery. Riley, the Governor’s Chauffeur has a line ‘the local hotels wouldn't be so packed, if a little black girl had gotten attacked’ that should prick at America’s collective conscience even today, while his killer lyric a few bars on, ‘there’s a black man swingin’ in every tree, but they don't never pay attention!’ has a devastating simplicity.

Parade also beats to the drum of a passionate love story. Early on we find Leo and Lucille questioning their very different Jewish lifestyles. He’s from Brooklyn, a ‘Yankee with a college education’, while she is a privileged belle about whom Frank observes ‘for the life of me I cannot understand how God created you people Jewish AND Southern!’. There is a cultural gulf between the pair which, upon Leo’s arrest, only widens. How Alfred Uhry’s book and Brown’s lyrics portray the couple’s deepening love, is a literary master stroke. 

While the show was to receive numerous nominations in both Broadway’s 1999 awards season and later in 2008 on its London opening, the Opening at New York's Lincoln Centre disappointed, running for barely 100 performances. Variety magazine called it the ‘ultimate feel-bad musical’ and the crowds stayed away.

It was however, to be at London’s modest Donmar Warehouse, directed by Rob Ashford who had been the show's original Dance Captain on Broadway, that the show was to soar. So much so that Brown took the Donmar production back for a successful run in Los Angeles, with Lara Pulver, the Donmar’s Lucille, still in the lead. Thom Southerland’s fringe production a few years later at London’s Southwark Playhouse received similar plaudits. 

So why was Parade loved in London, yet shunned in New York? Wise theatre heads have suggested that perhaps Americans have little appetite for a musical that focuses upon such an ugly feature of their country’s history.

100 years on, what has been the legacy of the Frank case? For good, it served to spawn the Anti-Defamation League, America’s anti-fascist organisation. However the episode also re-ignited the burning crosses of the Klu Klux Klan. I recently visited Marietta to see for myself where Leo Frank’s story ended. Sadly, even if un-surprisingly, the site isn't marked amidst what is now a busy road intersection and if you didn't know what you were looking for, you'd never know you've been there.

And think back to last year, with the horrific massacre of 9 Black Americans, shot as they prayed in a South Carolina church, by a man who was pictured proudly waving the Confederate flag. Incredibly up until last year, a handful of States still flew that flag from government buildings, with Mississippi still including the Confederate emblem as a component of its state flag to this day. 

The Leo Frank trial and its aftermath ripped a nation apart, re-opening fault lines that to this day have barely healed.

© Jonathan Baz 2016 All rights reserved

Parade opens at the Hope Mill Theatre on 18th May and plays until 5th June. 

For tickets, click here

Jerry's Girls - Review

St James Studio, London

****

Created by Jerry Herman and Larry Alford

Directed by Kate Golledge

Sarah-Louise Young, Anna-Jane Casey and Ria Jones

After the relative failure of Mack & Mabel on Broadway, Jerry Herman took a break from composition and embraced interior design. It might seem an unusual departure for the writer of mega-hits such as Mame and Hello Dolly! but Herman was pragmatic about the highs and lows of the industry. In 1981 however, he teamed up with Larry Alford to create a small cabaret of his greatest hits called Jerry's Girls. The production was a modest success and when La Cage Aux Folles opened two years later, Herman was hot again and with a little tweaking Jerry's Girls was given a full-blown production, first in Florida and then on Broadway.

Perhaps embracing the original concept, Aria Productions puts the emphasis on the songs rather than spectacle and feature three diversely talented performers - Ria Jones, Anna-Jane Casey and Sarah-Louise Young -  each of whom bring something very special to the table. Director Kate Golledge recognises the lightness of touch required for this style of cabaret and allows this triple-threat trio a relatively free hand to engage properly with their audience.

Musically, the highlights come thick and fast, from the clinking glasses that herald Tap Your Troubles Away to the edifying anthem I Am What I Am, delivered with steely determination by an exceptional Jones. Casey proves once again a truly versatile performer, clambering across the grand piano trilling the hilarious Nelson and yet bringing such poignancy to If He Walked Into My Life. Young's comic timing is very much in evidence throughout, no doubt honed through years on the cabaret circuit and lending an easy familiarity to the nature of La Cage Aux Folles.

In the intimacy of the St James Studio Matthew Cole's choreography only really comes to the fore with the Tap Your Troubles Away routine. What this number actually highlights is the versatility of Edward Court on piano and Sophie Byrne on woodwind, who gamely join in the routine and establish themselves irrefutably as part of the ensemble.

Jerry's Girls is however something of a misnomer. The book lists a few token references to the great performers Herman wrote for including Carol Channing, Angela Lansbury and Bernadette Peters and of course, there are his creations such as Dolly Levi, Mame Dennis, Mabel Normand, Countess Aurelia from Dear World and -  somewhat ambiguously - Zaza from La Cage. Thankfully Jerry's Boys make a few appearances and it wouldn't really be a Herman retrospective without the lyrical signature tune from Mack and Mabel, I Won't Send Roses.

Whichever way you look at it, one thing Jerry's Girls will remind you of is Herman's mastery of the musical theatre idiom. A genius of lyric as well as music, you will leave Jerry's Girls anxious for a revival of Mame or at least a desire to check out Hello Dolly! on Netflix. Of course, dedicated Herman fans will have already caught the wonderful recent production of The Grand Tour at the Finborough and have probably already booked for Mack and Mabel at Chichester.

Runs until March 15th 2015

Guest Reviewer : Paul Vale

The Jewish Legacy

The Radlett Centre

****

Directed by Leon Trayman

For two performances only, The Jewish Legacy came to leafy Radlett.  Devised by Katy Lipson’s Aria Entertainments and selecting only showtunes with a kosher provenance, Aria with Leon Trayman have found themselves spoilt for choice. Like a box of familiar chocolates, (soft-centred probably, judging by the age profile of the matinee audience) their compilation was a selection of Broadway favourites taken from the canon of the last 80 years or so.

Simply staged, four singers narrated and performed a programme that opened with Jerome Kern and Irving Berlin and ended amongst the work of current Broadway talent Jason Robert Brown. Kimberley Blake and Abi Finley provided the soprano voices, Blake having two particular second half highlights. Her Adelaide's Lament from Loesser's Guys and Dolls got the comedy-pathos of the song spot on whilst Send In The Clowns from Sondheim's A Little Night Music was a beautifully noble take on a notoriously challenging number. Finley's poise was as elegant. Having given a stunning contribution to the Kander and Ebb and Disney show medleys, her bang up to date Taylor The Latte Boy from Goldrich and Heisler was a story sweetly told through song.

Tom Millen and Trayman himself were perhaps slightly overshadowed by their leading ladies. Even so, Millen's take on On The Street Where You Live gave a genuine sense of the towering romantic desperation that Lerner and Loewe imbued within the song, whilst Trayman took it upon himself to sing Brown's (mildly autobiographical) Shiksa Goddess, a song that song bluntly and brilliantly tells of its Jewish author's grappling with his guilty conscience as as he falls for the charms of a gentile girl. 'Shiksa' is an extremely vulgar term of Yiddish slang, usually lost on a non-Jewish audience. In Radlett and to predominantly Jewish pensioners, Trayman's solid performance generated as many disapproving tuts from the old folk as it did shocked chuckles. Its a clever song but perhaps too offensive for the show's likely audience. Maybe stick to The Old Red Hills Of Home in future?

The Hebrew legacy left on The Great White Way is huge and to the producers' credit they've plugged their set full of comfortable classics with a liberal serving of Streisand and Fiddler thrown in too. Matt Rampling on piano directed his three piece band skilfully though the show would have been better served with a slightly larger musical ensemble and a compere more at ease with the show's (well researched) patter than the singers who occasionally sounded too scripted.

Demanding to be re-staged, the show is an imaginative and innovative arrangement of much loved tunes that offers a grand night out at the theatre. Both acts ended with big numbers from Bernstein and Sondheim’s West Side Story, Tonight and Somewhere respectively. These two famous songs (a duo and a solo) have each been cleverly re-arranged for four voices and the quartet delivered them with soaring harmonies. It’s a cunning move by the producers, ensuring that when the curtain falls the audience leaves grinning and with a tune on their lips.

Blood Wedding

Courtyard Theatre, London

**

Written by Federico Garcia Lorca
Translation by Tanya Ronder
Directed by Bronagh Lagan

Cassidy Janson

Lorca's Blood Wedding is a classic 20th century tragedy. Drawing upon the primal influences of the moon, the importance of the land and the spirituality of water and sketched out across a framework of love, despair and passionately tragic revenge, its poetry should harrow and destroy an audience. Bronagh Lagan's treatment of Tanya Ronder's translation sadly blunts the stark beauty of Lorca's verse.

In a cast of twelve, only three actors deliver engaging performances. Miles Yekinni, on stage for much of the single-act's 90 minute duration, stalks the characters as Death, frequently checking a pocket watch to indicate the looming, pre-destined bloody climax. Cassidy Janson, as a family servant, is an actor who only knows how to be excellent and her presence adds value to each of her scenes. Tamarin Payne's Moon, perhaps an over-excitable young girl for too much of the play's early movements, shows a beautiful balletic grace in a sweetly staged dance with Death. 

But that's it for the talent. Lynsey Beauchamp's grieving Mother hacks her way through text that should slice the audience open with her pain, trying too hard and lacking a natural air that is to be expected of a good professional performer. As the Bride, torn between the cravings of her heart for the already married Leonardo and the dutiful wife she knows she must be to her Groom, Anna Bamberger, (who also co-produces, an ominous sign) is lacklustre and wooden. And as for the story's wedding sequence, what should be an opportunity for a flamboyant and extravagant Latin dance routine is squandered. Maybe Lagan should have hired a choreographer, for whilst her wedding dance bore some recognisably Spanish touches, it was poorly planned and sloppily drilled.

Aria Entertainment who co-produce under the veritable human dynamo of Katy Lipson should get it better than this. Perhaps they need to focus more on the quality of their productions rather than the quantity?

Runs until 16th November 2013