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I ’m generally an anxious person,” admits Ben Platt, who was just off the plane from Sundance when we spoke. “But I find I can channel that pretty well into the characters I play,” he adds. That’s an understatement for the actor whose jittery, star-making turn in the title role of Dear Evan Hansen helped jump-start a national debate on adolescent mental health, and who returns to Broadway this spring in a much-lauded revival of the 1998 musical Parade.
Set in the early-20th-century Jim Crow South, Parade is based upon the true story of Leo Frank, a Cornell-educated Brooklyn Jew who moved to Atlanta, married Lucille Selig—a daughter of the city’s close-knit, well-off German Jewish community—and became superintendent of the National Pencil Company factory. In 1913, when the body of a 13-year-old worker named Mary Phagan was discovered in the factory’s basement, suspicion for the white girl’s murder initially fell upon a Black night watchman, Newt Lee, and the “Negro sweeper,” Jim Conley. But botched police work, a public prosecutor with overweening political ambitions, and sensationalized reports in the local press combined to whip the public into a vicious prejudicial frenzy—against Yankees, northern industrialists, and Jews. In this inflamed and tainted atmosphere, Frank became the prime suspect, was tried, and sentenced to death by hanging. When, after two years of failed legal appeals, Georgia governor John Slaton commuted Frank’s sentence to life in prison, some “upstanding citizens” in Phagan’s hometown of Marietta, Georgia, abducted Frank from his jail cell and lynched him.
Parade first opened in 1998, with Broadway legend Harold Prince as director and cocreator. Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Alfred Uhry (Driving Miss Daisy) won a Tony for the book (which takes some liberties with the historical record), as did the musical’s 20-something composer, Jason Robert Brown, for his complex and layered score. But reviews were mixed, and audiences, possibly lured by the play’s title into expecting something celebratory, were confused. Today, perhaps, we’re more primed for a musical of ideas exploring one of the darkest chapters in our nation’s history.
Uhry, who is 86, grew up in Atlanta’s German Jewish community—his great-uncle owned the pencil factory where Phagan and Frank worked. “Nobody would talk about the Leo Frank case,” he recalls on the phone from his apartment on the Upper West Side. “I remember being a little kid, one time when my parents had company over and somebody brought up Leo Frank, and one of the men at the gathering just got up and walked out of the room.” The unspoken trauma of the case and its murderous aftermath could not be laid to rest.
It also reverberated across the nation, as a defining moment in both the American Jewish experience and race relations. The murders of Phagan and Frank lent urgency to the newly created Anti-Defamation League—founded in 1913 with the mission “to stop the defamation of the Jewish people and secure justice and fair treatment for all”—but also galvanized a revival of the Ku Klux Klan. (Klan activity had declined in the decades following Reconstruction, but in 1915, organizers seeking to reinvigorate it—inspired also by D. W. Griffith’s 1915 silent film, The Birth of a Nation—aligned with the Marietta-based Knights of Mary Phagan, a group that had sworn vengeance for the child’s murder.)
It’s dire and heady material for a Broadway musical, but Parade finds beauty and solace in its story of a marriage, and in the interior transformations of Leo and Lucille. They begin the play closed off from each other but find love and understanding through their evolving ordeal.
For Micaela Diamond, the multi-talented, pre-Raphaelite beauty who plays Lucille Frank, the musical opens a window onto a little-known chapter of history. “In America, we hear so much about the Holocaust, but Parade is about an antisemitism that is earlier—a homegrown and specifically American-flavored form of hatred,” she says, when we meet over coffee at an Upper West Side café. Diamond, who is Jewish, grew up attending a Conservative synagogue in Margate, New Jersey, and got the call that she had landed her first Broadway role, as the young Cher in The Cher Show, while on a Birthright trip to Israel during the summer after her graduation from Manhattan’s LaGuardia High School.
For her, the character of Lucille—a would-be Southern belle who finds the strength to step beyond the limits of that vexed ideal—allows us to explore the complex ways in which racism and antisemitism are intertwined. “Lucille, like so many Jews before and after her, is white until she is undeniably Jewish,” Diamond explains, “and she has to confront that reality, both in her husband and in herself.”
Lucille is also “one of the great roles for Jewish women in musical theater—though it’s quite a short list,” Diamond says, citing Fanny in Funny Girl, Carole King in Beautiful, and Golde and her three older daughters in Fiddler on the Roof. “This production is the first time that two Jewish actors have been cast as Leo and Lucille,” she notes. “And I think there is a deeper awareness in our culture now, where we’re beginning to ask the question, Why aren’t Jewish people telling their own stories?”
In October 2021, actor and comedian Sarah Silverman used her podcast to call out what she called Hollywood’s “Jewface” problem—the very frequent casting of non-Jewish actors to portray characters whose Jewishness is central to their identity, such as Ruth Bader Ginsburg (played onscreen by Felicity Jones in On the Basis of Sex), Miriam Maisel (Rachel Brosnahan in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel), and others. (A more recent example: Michelle Williams’s Oscar-nominated portrayal of a character based on Steven Spielberg’s mother in The Fabelmans.) The podcast struck a chord with many. Because while it’s true that Jews come in all shapes, colors, and sizes—and there’s no lack of Jewish acting talent—Hollywood in particular has trouble imagining beautiful, sexy, and heroic Jewish women playing explicitly Jewish roles.
For Platt, who describes himself now as “culturally Jewish” but who was raised in a religiously observant household in Los Angeles, “Leo is the first character I’ve played whose Judaism is intrinsic to the role,” he says. It’s also his first depiction of a historical personage. That involves “an added level of responsibility,” he says, “in how I am representing him to the world.”
It can be a challenge, he explains, “when someone becomes a martyr to history and a symbol, to really understand who they were.” In Parade, Leo starts out “difficult and unlikable, he has a lot of hubris, and he’s very guarded. It’s his relationship with his wife which allows that to unravel a bit, so that we see some of the humanity and warmth,” Platt says. “But I like that he doesn’t need to be presented as this perfect person, for us all to agree that there was a systemic failure in the way the country and the legal system handled him.”
For that, he also has Diamond to help. “She’s wonderful in this,” he says. “It doesn’t take you long to feel that she’s on the path to something really big. She has this special energy that people want to be around. It’s also very meaningful to me that we are both just about the ages that Lucille and Leo were at that time, and that we were both raised Jewish.” A lot of the experiences he’s had—in Dear Evan Hansen, for example, or on television in The Politician—“have been me out on a limb,” he says. “So it’s nice here to have a partner in crime.”
Was Leo Frank guilty of murder? Absolutely not, say Platt, Diamond, and composer Jason Robert Brown, while writer Alfred Uhry demurs. “It’s 99.9 percent certain that he didn’t do it,” says Uhry. “But that little niggling doubt made the play more interesting for me to write.”
It took over 70 years, until 1986, for the state of Georgia to posthumously pardon Frank, based not upon the acknowledged discovery of irrefutable proof of his innocence, but because the state had failed to protect him. To this day his killers have never been brought to justice. The factory’s sweeper, Jim Conley, was sentenced to a year on a chain gang as an accessory to the murder, but no one else was ever convicted of killing Mary Phagan. In 1922, when a young Dutch reporter at The Atlanta Constitution, Pierre Van Paassen, uncovered startling evidence absolving Frank of the crime (that his dental records did not match teeth marks found on the dead girl’s body), leading members of Atlanta’s Jewish community begged Van Paassen’s editors to cancel the series he was planning to write, fearful that it would stir up further resentments. Meanwhile, a threat from an anonymous source was made on Van Paassen’s life. Shaken, he dropped the story after someone tried to kill him.
Director Michael Arden grew up Southern Baptist in Midland, Texas, home to Robert E. Lee High School. There, he says, he “was a little gay boy, dancing around on my front lawn, waving a Confederate flag, and having no idea what it meant beyond, We are proud, this is us.” While preparing to direct the revival of Parade, he visited the site of Frank’s lynching in Marietta. “There’s a sad little plaque, next to a Waffle House, a burrito shop, and a freeway,” he says. “I photographed the plaque, and that’s the image that the audience will see when they walk in.”
Taking his cue from Bertolt Brecht’s concept of “the alienation effect,” Arden elegantly layers in archival elements—photographs of the story’s real-life characters, for example, or tabloid newsprint coverage of the case—as backdrop. “So you see Ben Platt and think, Oh, I loved him in Dear Evan Hansen, and then you see a picture of Leo Frank, a real man who was hanged, and you acknowledge that these two disparate elements are coming together,” he says. “It’s a constant reminder that this isn’t just entertainment, it’s also history.” For Arden, the most interesting part of the story is not “whether Frank is guilty or innocent,” he says. “My job is rather to interrogate the decline and dissolution of justice, because of the traumas of the past.” The play’s Black characters are navigating and intensely vulnerable to a system bent on destroying them—Georgia was second only to Mississippi in the lynching of its Black citizens, a chilling and grim statistic. And of course little Mary Phagan, the factory worker, was just a child.
“It was a time in which the economic stability and livelihoods of so many people were completely turned upside down,” Arden explains. “There was class hatred. They had lost an entire generation to the Civil War and then were told: You shouldn’t grieve, because you were on the wrong side of history.” The Leo Frank case represented “what of the war could still be waged. Could Leo Frank, who was from Brooklyn, be a way to show our anger about everything that had been taken from us?” So the play opens and closes with “The Old Red Hills of Home,” a lushly nostalgic ballad representing “the patriotic pride of the South,” Arden says. “It’s very stirring. But when you are listening to it and watching children waving Confederate flags, it’s very scary.”
Composer Jason Robert Brown concurs. “We make a very strong point to start the show in the Civil War,” he says, “to emphasize that the resonances of that particular time in our history are a large part of what contributed to the tragedy of Leo Frank and continue to contribute to our national divisions now.” And those divisions are still raw. This new production of Parade had a six-day run at New York’s City Center last November, coinciding with a moment when high-profile antisemitic incidents were cresting in the nation’s consciousness. Antisemitic comments by celebrities such as Kanye West were echoed on social media, on a highway banner in Los Angeles, in graffiti on college campuses, and elsewhere.
“In 2021 we had the highest number of antisemitic incidents that we’ve seen in almost 45 years of tallying this data,” says Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO and national director of the Anti-Defamation League. We were speaking the day after someone had thrown a Molotov cocktail at a synagogue in New Jersey. “We saw almost a doubling of strongly antisemitic attitudes in this country, from 11 percent in 2019 to 20 percent in 2022”—attitudes based upon lies about Jewish greed, for example.
“Parade would be a piece of art worth viewing and telling regardless of its contemporary relevance,” Platt says. “But it’s just really rare to have a piece where you feel that, as an artist, you would do it no matter the context, but then as a human, it’s a story that’s important to tell, and there’s a real reason to do it now.
“There’s nothing wrong with doing a show that is just a great showcase, or funny or lighthearted, and I hope to be a part of many of those in the future,” he continues. “But Dear Evan Hansen was quite a moment, and getting to come back to Broadway in something where there is some real urgency about getting people to come and see it, it just feels again like a nod from the universe, that this is the right time and the right thing.”
Preview performances of Parade begin February 21 at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater.
In this story: hair, Ilker Akyol; makeup, Kuma; grooming, Melissa Dezarate.