Posted on October 2, 2007 at 11:36 pm

Nicholas deJongh’s review here.

Parade
Donmar Warehouse
Earlham Street, WC2H 9LD

Nicholas de Jongh’s rating: FOUR STARS

Dir: Rob Ashford.
Cast: Lara Pulver, Bertie Carvel, Helen Anker, Mark Bonnar, Norman Bowman, Shaun Escoffery, Joanna Kirkland, Gary Milner, Steven Page, Malinda Parris, Stuart Matthew Price, Zoe Rainey, Celia Mei Rubin, Stephen Webb, Jayne Wisener

A musical that dares to be serious
By Nicholas de Jongh, Evening Standard 25.09.07

Please don’t rain on it: Parade is a devastating, emotional show

I cannot remember when the narrative and plotting of a musical last kept me engaged, let alone gripped. Parade, book by Alfred Uhry, manages the feat at last. Here is that rare thing: a piece of musical theatre, deftly executed on a bare, galleried stage by director Rob Ashford, that dares to be serious.

It delves into a notorious miscarriage of justice in Georgia in 1913, when an Ivy league northerner, the young Jewish Leo Black, superbly incarnated and sung by Bertie Carvel, was convicted of murdering a 13-year-old girl. The expressionistic scene when the judge hands down a death sentence, the chorus dancing in grotesque mockery of Carvel, conveys the crucial sense of Southern fanaticism.

Parade also displays political concern and social conscience in dealing with anti-Semitism and racism, those bad, old traits in America’s deep south. In place of a traditional true-love ending, proclaimed in song and dance, it closes with a true-life scene of gruesome brutality.

I must admit, though, that Jason Robert Brown’s music, with its blues, hymns, spirituals and anthems, is indebted to Stephen Sondheim almost to the point of insolvency. It often sounds like an eloquent pastiche, particularly of Sunday in the Park with George. Brown’s often ponderous lyrics miss out on Sondheimite wit and cleverness.

A prologue song, Old Red Hills of Home, Brown’s far too respectful evocation of Defeated Southerners still smarting from Civil War Defeat, emphasises how these Georgians perpetually hanker for “a way of life that’s pure”.

Thanks to Carvel’s fraught performance as Leo, this superintendent of a pencil-making factory emerges as a nervy, charmless outsider, uncomfortable in his own skin and this location, irritably at odds with his devoted wife (a shrill-voiced Lara Pulver).

After Leo’s arrest for murder, false sexual allegations pour from the mouths of complicit girls and Shaun Escoffery’s accuser, in a style reminiscent of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. In comparable fashion Mark Bonnar’s state prosecutor and Norman Bowman’s sinister, anti-Semitic newspaper editor whip up hysteria until Gary Milner’s mysteriously ambivalent Governor is goaded by Lucille to unmask the liars.

The second half flags: Uhry and Brown spend too much grieving over the dead girl and turning the Franks into passionate lovers, too little in showing what a national furore the case caused. Despite these flaws, Parade makes a devastating, emotional show.

• Until 24 November. Information: 0870 060 6624.