Posted on October 2, 2007 at 10:11 pm

PARADE
Donmar Warehouse, London
2 hrs 30 mins (including interval)
Four stars
by GEORGINA BROWN

Parade, a modern opera by Alfred (Driving Miss Daisy)Uhry, with a wonderful score (mixing the rat-a-tat-tat of military drums with hymns and jazzy dance music of a decade ago) by Jason Robert Brown, tells a compelling true story of Leo Frank, the boss charged with the murder of a 13-year-old labourer found strangled in the pencil factory he ran in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1913.

A New York, Ivy League-educated Jew, who doesn’t fit in, Frank is framed. Like Arthur Miller’s Crucible, the piece escalates, driven by prejudice and gleeful hysteria, spiralling into tragedy.

In Rob Ashford’s production, the singing is superb, as are the often grotesque dance sequences.

As the baddie who brings Frank down, Shaun Escoffery is a knockout. But Bertie Carvel’s fastidious Frank, twitchily tense to the point of neurasthenia, out of his comfort zone an inch away from his desk, is also very impressive. You won’t find a more richly rewarding – if wretched – show in town.