#parade broadway

[winter-asleepening]

Jokes on you that’s all of them

[technicolor-dreamss]

“All the wasted time to never show I loved you so”

I forgot to post this here but HOORAY PARADE WON THE TONY FOR BEST REVIVAL!!!!! Absolutely deserved it’s a beautiful production of a beautiful show

[sea-changed]

Parade 2023 revival on Broadway

[snap-my-kneecaps]

I need to stop listening to and falling in love with Broadway shows that I will never be able to see…

I just set myself up emotional distress

[spindle-magic]

Parade (2023) is my Roman Empire. Am I doing something productive right now? No. Am I thinking about Old Red Hills of Home? Yes.

[ispeaktheyburn]

Things I learned about the Leo Frank case from reading And the Dead Shall Rise by Steve Oney (note: none of this is meant to drag Parade, which I love with all my heart):

-Britt Craig didn’t launch a smear campaign against Leo; he was just the reporter who broke the news of Mary Phagan’s murder (before Leo was considered a suspect).

-“That’s What He Said” is a pretty accurate depiction of Jim Conley’s testimony on how he allegedly acted as Leo’s accomplice and helped him hide Mary’s body in the basement, but before the trial he gave four different versions of the story in affidavits (the police grilled him until he produced a version they were satisfied with).

-I’ve posted about this before, but Leo’s lawyers were racist as fuck. They argued that Jim Conley’s race made him inherently untrustworthy and that “no white man” could have committed such a brutal crime. I’m guessing JRB/Uhry chose not to include this in the musical because it would have made it harder to sympathize with Leo.

-The musical exaggerates the antisemitism that occurred during the trial—not to say there wasn’t any, but incidents like Mary’s mother spitting “Jew” at Leo when she was on the stand are definitely fiction. The most blatant, violent antisemitism arose after the trial, when Northern Jewish-owned newspapers started campaigning to save Leo.

-The unsworn statement Leo made at the trial was nothing like “It’s Hard to Speak My Heart”—he used most of it to explain the work he did at the National Pencil Company on the morning before the murder to convince the jury that his hands were too full to kill Mary, but it probably just made them perceive him as cold and unfeeling.  -Several of the factory girls who testified against Leo did recant their testimony and admit to being coached by Hugh Dorsey, but later they recanted their recantations and claimed they were coerced by William Burns (a private detective working with the defense to clear Leo’s name) into changing their testimony. Of course, Burns denied the accusations and the defense accused the prosecution of bullying the girls into changing their testimony again. So it’s clear that they were bullied by one side or the other, but we’ll probably never know which side.

-Tom Watson was silent on the case until a year after the murder, when a newspaper run by his political rival published an editorial supporting Leo. Also, if you think Watson is evil incarnate in the musical, the real guy’s writings make the musical version look like Mr. Rogers.

-Jim Conley had his own lawyer during the proceedings, William Smith, who came to believe Jim was the actual murderer and played a major role in Governor Slaton’s decision to commute Leo’s sentence to life imprisonment (he also wrote a note on his deathbed professing his belief in Leo’s innocence). 

To sum up: I'd highly recommend this book to any fan of Parade who’s interested in learning more about the case; just don’t read it expecting to find 100% incontrovertible proof of Leo’s innocence. I still believe he was most likely innocent, but I found myself agreeing with Oney’s comment on the last page that “there will never be a resolution to the Frank case,” because it’s a lot murkier than the musical would have people believe.

[aalex-aarts]

tumblr, i have come again to ask for bootlegs. If anyone has a video OR audio bootleg of Parade (specifically the revival), please send 🙏

[someoneinthemirror]

Ben Platt photographed by Justin Jun Lee for Los Angeles Times *

[tarotmantic]

HAPPY (belated) WORLD THEATRE DAY

Ben Platt did a little shoutout for every member of the Parade cast in honour of the occasion on his Instagram story. This is part 1 of 3.

[mrsrobertfloyd5]

I just think that Micaela Diamond

[william-austin]

hi tumblr I saw parade and cried !!

and then my short ass stagedoored for the first time and no one signed anything but obv but anyway I saw ben and micaela so dreams fulfilled !!

[beautyinsteadofashes]

oh man i’m sobbing. the ending still hits you regardless of what production it is. 

i’m so mad and so happy and so sad all at once

[turniptitaness]

Read this, fellas. I am so distinctly not okay.

[sea-changed]

Parade’s curtain call, reimagined in the style of a courtroom sketch by August Lamm

[araindropshallfall]

Hey does anyone know what Michael Arden said during his acceptance speech that got censored?

[spindle-magic]

Still thinking about Parade

Particularly Micaela’s face at one specific moment, discussed below. If you don’t want to know anything about the show going into it, then don’t read the below please.

Okay. After All the Wasted Time, when Leo wraps Lucille in the blanket and she walks off, she has this look on her face briefly as she exits that is so hopeful, and it made me burst into tears in the theater. I genuinely cannot stop thinking about that moment.