Posted on October 2, 2007 at 10:05 pm

Quentin Letts’s review here.

Fight for truth that’s worth singing about in Parade
by QUENTIN LETTS
Last updated at 15:11pm on 28th September 2007

Rating: Five stars
Verdict: Fresh talents and a sorry injustice

Parade seems a misleading title for this troubling musical.

‘Parade’ suggests something fluffy, something with stripy sticks and top hats and gaiety.

This show is not entirely dank and gloomy. It has an ingenious, jazzy score with lots of clarinet work and some beautifully fresh singing.

The opening song by a young lad called Stuart Matthew Price grips you from the first run of breathy tenor notes.

But the plot – the unfair trial of a Jewish businessman in Atlanta, Georgia, a century ago – is hardly the normal stuff of musicals.

‘Parade’ seems a weak word for all the dilemmas and anguish shown here.

The case of Leo Frank, accused of murdering a 13-year-old factory girl, saw New York Jewry mobilise against anti-Jewish forces in the Old South.

It was a case which, arguably, gave rise to the modern anti-defamation lobbies which have made today’s American justice such a politicised lottery (O.J. Simpson perhaps springs to mind).

One of the strong points of this production is that Frank (Bertie Carvel) is not presented as a gilded victim. Mr Carvel delivers him twitches and all, an unsympathetic figure who behaves most oddly when accused of murder.

Such a weirdo is all too easily believed to be guilty when witnesses are leaned on to say he murdered pretty Mary Phagan (done with a doll’s innocence by Jayne Wisener).

The first half would be hard to better. The arrest of oddball Frank acquires a cruel momentum which climaxes with a murder trial.

“That’s what he said, that’s what he said,” chant the perjuring witnesses in frightening unison.

The dead girl’s mother sees her Easter dress and party shoes and sings an almost unbearably sad song.

Only the last word of this – a spat-out “Jew!” – brings you up short, shocked by the sudden admission of hatred.

There is even a topicality in this story which is hard to deny. In the Frank case the popular newspapers became obsessed with the death of the young girl.

Their clamour made the politicians sweat and seems to have made the police fabricate evidence.

Are there not several parallels here with the modern media’s wild coverage of Madeleine McCann’s disappearance? Mind you, some of the reporting of the Frank case, if depicted accurately here, would never have got past our sub judice laws.

The show’s second half has some watchable dancing but, strangely, I found the campaign to clear Frank’s name by his admirable wife (a faultless Lara Pulver) less exciting than the horrible business of his persecution.

Some of the crescendos and swelling chords of the fight-back were a touch corny for my taste. And maybe the last scenes (we won’t spoil the storyline) stretch disbelief.

They have too much of the flavour of ethnic idealism, of Frank being claimed for a cause.

This is, though, a powerful, intelligent show, rooted in distressing truths.