A miscarriage of justice revisited
SpeakEasy Stage Company is concluding an ambitious season with its most ambitious production yet, a large-scale staging of the musical "Parade." Director Paul Daigneault deploys his siz able forces with a strong sense of pattern and flow, expertly arranging both crowded tableaux and intimate smaller scenes on Eric Levenson's fluid set; music director Jose Delgado and choreographer David Connolly provide powerful and graceful support. If only the production -- and the musical itself -- were as richly three-dimensional as the effort put into it.
Instead, Alfred Uhry's book and Jason Robert Brown's lyrics, about a miscarriage of justice in 1913 Atlanta, let us know early and often that bigotry is bad. Also, bigots are mean. Oh, and stupid, too.
No argument there. Nor is there any disputing that the true story on which "Parade" is based, of the persecution and trial of an innocent Jewish man for the murder of a young factory worker, is a horrific and saddening one. But no musical, however well - intentioned, can sustain our interest for more than two hours by repeatedly striking a single note.
Musically, that's not quite fair -- Brown's melodies are arresting and varied, with a fine blending of vernacular styles, from bl ues to ragtime to Southern Baptist hymns, into a coherent and freshly contemporary whole. The score won a Tony in 1999, and deservedly so. But the book also won, and that makes less sense -- surely this Tony was awarded for correctness of sentiment, not elegance of storytelling.
Subtle it ain't. From the first vengeful anthem to Southern honor and tradition, through all the nasty crowd scenes and the tormented cries of the oppressed, right up to the sledgehammer irony of the final parade, Uhry and Brown make sure we know that the bad guys are really, really bad, and the good guys -- defendant Leo Frank; his wife, Lucille; and the people, especially the downtrodden black ones, who are manipulated by ambitious and nasty white power brokers -- are really, really good, except for the tiny flaws that only make them more touchingly human. Leo's too smart, Lucille's too passionate -- with flaws like that, who needs virtues?
It doesn't help that Daigneault's direction underscores the meanness instead of underplaying it. When every hymn to honor and godliness is sung with a sneer of contempt, when every face in the vengeful crowd is contorted into a slit-eyed mask of poisonous hatred, the villains are reduced to two-dimensional cutouts. They'd be more interesting -- and a lot more frightening -- if they seemed like fully rounded human beings who had taken a terribly wrong turn.
Brendan McNab does bring subtlety and nuance to Leo, but that's partly because he has more to work with. We see both his humanity and his fatal arrogance, never more fully blended than in the wry but heartfelt lament of a displaced New Yorker, "How Can I Call This Home." And his relationship with Lucille (given sharpness and fire by Bridget Beirne, despite persistent interference from her body mike) manages to turn the mechanical lurchings of the book -- they're distant, she's suspicious, he's persuasive, they're like new lovers all over again -- into something that almost feels real.
Other vocal standouts in the large cast include Kerry A. Dowling, who gives surprising complexity to the murdered girl's mother in her one big song; the deceptively angel-faced Austin Lesch, in a couple of rotten-Reb parts; Timothy John Smith, as the roaringly drunk and ragingly cynical reporter who takes the story and runs with it; and Edward M. Barker, as a shady night watchman who's happy to say whatever the prosecutor wants, as long as it keeps him off the chain gang.
As that prosecutor, David Krinitt is perfectly hard and calculating -- an avenging automaton. The governor who orders him to get a conviction -- never mind whose -- receives a little more shading, but even the persuasive performance of Terrence O'Malley can't entirely overcome the book's failure to connect us with the internal musings that provoke the governor's change of heart. He just changes, as if he's been traded from the Bads to the Goods.
Bigotry is bad. But part of its badness is that it reduces the complex grays of the world to black and white. A powerful response to it, which "Parade" so clearly wants to be, just can't be that simple.
Louise Kennedy can be reached at kennedy@globe.com. 