NEW YORK — At the new Broadway production of “Parade,” the customary recorded admonition to silence cellphones is delivered by no less a personage than Raphael Warnock, the U.S. senator from Georgia.
Clearly, that’s an effort to acknowledge that while this somber, gorgeously scored Jason Robert Brown musical is about the prejudiced 1913 murder trial and subsequent lynching of a Jewish man, Leo Frank, in that Peach State in 1915, everyone involved knows that it was Black Georgians who were far more likely to suffer that fate. And, of course, it’s also a tacit statement that the racist forces of corruption and intolerance that figure in the piece remain very much at large.
The new revival, which stars Ben Platt in the title role, is a more politically engaged “Parade” than the one I remember more than 20 years ago, less of a melancholy exploration of the clash of cultural division and more of an explicit indictment of Southern Republicans and their jingoistic, lingering, festering loyalties to the remnants of the Confederacy, a hotbed of racism and antisemitism.
