Parade (book by Alfred Uhry, music and lyrics by Jason Robert Brown) is a musical about the 1913 Leo Frank case, which culminates in his lynching in 1915. A lot of people find entertainments about abominations of justice that culminate in brutal murders by angry mobs of morons to be sort of oxymoronic, which explains, at least in part, the chilly reception Parade got when it opened on Broadway in 2000, and closed after 39 previews and only 84 regular performances (the collapse of its chief producer, Livent, during its run, probably didn't help boost sales, either). Sure, it's possible to have a musical that is a smash hit and also a total downer--Cabaret and West Side Story are proof--but Parade came off as just a little too clinical, a little too two-dimensional, to stir the emotions of its audiences.
While this may be a central flaw in the musical, it's also one that I find particularly understandable. Leo Frank, after all, was unfairly accused of a murder, given an outrageously sham trial, and wrongly sentenced to death, basically because he was Jewish and unpopular. When the sentence was finally commuted to life in prison instead of death by hanging, he was promptly lynched by several upstanding members of the Marietta, Georgia, community (including a former governor of Georgia, several sheriffs, a judge, the mayor, and a general assemblyman who later formed the town's first Boy Scout troop). At their most basic, the events are so dreadful, so grotesque, so completely Kafkaesque, that I can understand the hesitancy among the creative team to flesh out the characters too deeply. Encouraging your audience to bond with a character who was, in reality, so terrifyingly doomed is its own fucked-up kind of torture. I would be willing to bet that the creative team struggled mightily on this front.
