Posted on October 2, 2007 at 10:33 pm

Sunday Telegraph, 30 September 2007
ON A SERIOUS NOTE…
Tim Walker, Theatre

Parade (five stars)

Tragedy has befallen a little girl: the police are briefing the press, politicians and lawyers are piling in, and, on the front pages, reputations are being blackened. The locals – as well as people who live hundreds, if not thousands, of miles away – are taking entrenched positions on the affair although they know diddly-squat about it.

I need hardly say why Parade at the Donmar Warehouse is unnervingly topical. The new musical is based not on any recent events, however, but on the case of Leo Frank, an Ivy League Jew who was framed in 1913 for the murder of a 13-year-old factory girl named Mary Phagan on the basis of some dubious evidence from Jim Conley, a black man with an extensive criminal record.

On the face of it, this cause célèbre seems an unlikely story to be set to music, but, as it turns out, Jason Robert Brown’s nervy, edgy music and lyrics invest the dark proceedings with a peculiar dynamism. With Alfred Uhry’s insightful script, and that wise old bird Harold Prince on board as the ‘co-conceiver’, this is, genuinely and oxymoronically, a sophisticated musical.

We tend to think these days that the good ol’ boys Down South only strung up black people, but they were also inclined to do it to, among others, Jews, particularly smart-aleck ones from the Bronx [sic] like Frank. Bertie Carvel plays him with an unmistakable air of superiority at the start, but he begins to disintegrate before our eyes when the gravity of his position becomes clear to him: his hands are in perpetual motion, his eyes dart around the stage like those of a cornered animal.

The man can sing as well as act; a dual skill that he shares with the rest of the cast. I particularly admired Lara Pulver as Frank’s wife; Shaun Escoffery’s Conley; Mark Bonnar as the prosecutor; and, as the man charged with defending him, Stephen Webb (who is, by the way, a dead ringer for the youthful Ronald Reagan). There is a chilling turn, too, from Jayne Wisener, who haunts the stage like the little girl in red from Schindler’s List.

Thanks to Christopher Oram’s design and Neil Austin’s artful lighting, the whole thing seems a lot bigger than the stage on which it is played and it reminds me, in terms of its looks, of Porgy and Bess at the much grander Savoy. I have been doing this job for a few years now and I would say that this production, directed by Rob Ashford, ranks as one of the Donmar’s very best. And that is praise indeed.