Posted on October 2, 2007 at 9:34 pm

Kate Baxter’s review here.

At the Donmar, Parade is an unusually dark Broadway musical by Alfred Uhry and Jason Robert Brown, based on the notorious case of Leo Frank in Georgia in 1913. A factory superintendent and Jewish Yankee, Frank was found – very dubiously – guilty of the murder of a 13-year-old worker, Mary Phagan. When a miscarriage of justice was announced he was lynched – essentially by the revived Ku Klux Klan.

Choreographer-turned-director Rob Ashford’s production gets off to a stiff start, before launching into nightmarish, whirling stomps. The prologue, set in the Civil War, seems largely pointless and Ashford’s use of doubling is sometimes confusing. Nonetheless, this is a rivetingly horrific true story of institutionalised xenophobia and inflammable mass prejudice. Gangly bespectacled Bertie Carvel, as Frank, looks disturbingly inscrutable, and Shaun Escoffery is electrifying as the black factory cleaner, Conley, an ex-con with swagger and a storming voice.