PARADE on B'way, 2023

[scenicdesign71]

I think someone should start a GoFundMe campaign for @scenicdesign71 to be able to see Parade.

Ha, that's such a sweet thought, @KathyB!    There's still a couple more months, so with luck things will pick up for me before Parade closes.

After discovering I had accumulated a shitload of unused Audience Rewards points from Telecharge, I cashed in most of them for a ticket to Parade Saturday night, and it singlehandedly redeemed my sour theatergoing mood since at least March (i.e., Sweeney Todd, maddening) or perhaps even January (Merrily, mildly disappointing — after last year's long-awaited and thrilling Company, 2023 has thus far been a frustrating year for seeing Sondheim's work in his hometown, by my finicky standards).

Afterward, I sat down happily for a late dinner at 5 Napkin Burger, where the waitress professed to being a Parade fan herself -- the background surface in this photo, on which my playbill is resting, is one of 5NB's glossy dark-walnut two-tops:

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After coming home that night to reread the show's New Yorker and NYT reviews, I then spent Sunday morning going through some of the others.  I'm so happy not to have let this slip by, for once -- and grateful for those Rewards points, without which I really wouldn't have been able to see this before it closes in two weeks -- certainly not from such good seats, and probably not at all.



To my relief (given the competition), Parade really did trounce this year's Camelot and Sweeney fair and square for the Best Musical Revival Tony -- in the sense not only of winning that award but of deserving it incalculably more than those other productions; it probably also deserved its victory over ITW, though I shouldn't say that without having seen the latter.  What I can say is that Parade deserves to run much longer than five months, and/or to send out a tour (though I sadly haven't heard of any plans for one), even without its two Broadway leads if necessary: this production should be seen by more people.

While Ben Platt and Micaela Diamond didn't win the Best Actor and Actress Tonys for which they were each rightly nominated, I like to think it was not only because they faced worthy competition from the respective winners (J. Harrison Ghee and Victoria Clark), but because their performances complemented each other so well as to feel like two halves of a single whole. It would be interesting to see each of them perform opposite an understudy "spouse," for comparison's sake, but I'm glad I got to see both together.

That notwithstanding, this production is not The Leo and Lucille Show -- it probably can't be, as written: as structurally central as the couple is, the large story around them is a mass of complicated interlocking parts, all of them given shrewd and ample care and attention here.  For me, Michael Arden's staging rehabilitates the idea of stripped-back, presentational story-theatre that has been used so often (and, in too many instances, so clumsily and to so little point) on Broadway over the past decade or two that it's finally become hard, even for me, to approach such stagings without a degree of skepticism (i.e.: production costs may be lowered, arty pretensions may be flexed, but is it actually serving the play?).

This Parade inspires no such misgivings: Arden's revival feels like a full, epic staging (large cast; full orchestra in the pit, not onstage; and the physical production is a thoughtful and generous eyeful) despite the bold and specific spatial constraints he and set designer Dane Laffrey have devised for themselves.  Sven Ortel's projections work elegant magic, both as evocative atmosphere and sharp documentary annotation, driving the story in brilliant tandem with Arden's (and co-choreographers Lauren Yalago-Grant's and Christopher Cree Grant's) whip-smart staging.  My old NYU professor Susan Hilferty's costumes are note-perfect -- the luminous and eye-opening embodiment, thirty years later, of her classroom insistence that clothing should support the story and the actors' performances without feeling "costume-y" (a wise and reasonable principle, then as now, but at the time I found it an almost impossible needle to thread in practice).  And Heather Gilbert's un-showy but hardworking lighting sculpts the event gorgeously, an especially impressive feat given the more-than-usually intricate coordination of her work with that of her colleagues: a substantial portion of her plot is built into the groundplan and trusswork framing Laffrey's set, while Ortel's projections pose their own lighting challenge, encompassing an unusually large projection field on the upstage wall, while also implementing another, smaller surface at floor-level very far downstage, right where actors often need to be lit.

Ironically, this Parade -- evidently very different from Hal Prince's original staging, which I'd still like to watch at the Lincoln Center library sometime -- has been handled with just the kind of storytelling care and acumen that I found so miserably wanting in the Sweeney Todd revival that's about to outrun it.  Irony within irony: in its combination of Brechtian spareness and epic scale, this Parade shares a certain broad kinship with Prince's original Sweeney (among several of his other shows).  But while Kail's misguided mess makes an unfortunate argument for not fixing what ain't broke, that specific Brecht-epic flavor really isn't what I'm so hung-up about missing in his Sweeney revival.  (Indeed, that "flavor" arguably isn't altogether missing -- Kail's staging pays a kind of lame homage, with ensemble members carting around furniture for scene-changes and whatnot -- so much as it is radically misunderstood and less-than-half-baked).  Rather, it's an attunement and attentiveness to the material, and a sense of storytelling detail and engagement, which are all but entirely absent at the Lunt these days, but thriving (for a couple more weeks, anyway) at the Jacobs.

[scenicdesign71]

"Procession Slime Tutorial" (B'way 2023, complete):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NnDAohyNrSE


This is the only full-show capture I've found.  Taken from a very good seat in the left front mezzanine, it isn't pro-shot quality; but in compensation for uniformly blown-out/overexposed faces, it provides an excellent broad view of the staging and design.  Colors occasionally get digitally oversaturated (or, conversely, washed-out) by the camera, but not often- or acutely-enough to do much damage to the designers' exquisite palette (crucially that of Heather Gilbert's lighting, which generally comes through pretty well here).  The picture is well-framed in steady, if unvarying, wide-shot; and the sound is good -- again, not soundboard-quality, but crisp and clear overall.

In other words, even at a relatively quick glance, you wouldn't mistake this for pro-shot.  But it's still leagues better than, say, the ancient OBC bootlegs of Follies and Merrily We Roll Along and Sweeney, which are at least as frustrating to watch as they are priceless.

The preshow projection image may deserve a little explanation.  The projected text is actually a photo detail of the plaque in Marietta, GA marking the site of Leo Frank's murder.  But the audience arrived to a much wider photo panorama of the present-day site (nowadays just a tiny sliver of green space wedged between a highway overpass and a Waffle House) -- with the memorial marker itself, too distant to be legible, attracting no notice among the trees, telephone poles, and cars rushing by (in tastefully motion-blurred AfterEffects).   At about five or ten minutes before curtain, this image began a subliminally slow but inexorable, telescopically smooth and seamless zoom into the plaque, its text eventually filling the stage's entire backwall, before homing in still further on the final sentence:  "Without addressing guilt or innocence, and in recognition of the state's failure to either protect Frank or bring his killers to justice, he was granted a posthumous pardon in 1986."

Intermission is cleanly excluded from this recording: the camera stops as soon as the houselights come up, then instantly restarts just as the second act begins (now in 1:1 square ratio, for some reason, instead of the previous 4:3).  But it's probably worth noting that Platt spent the entire intermission onstage in his "jail cell" gazing, hollow-eyed, into the middle distance as two years passed in fifteen minutes.  (At one point, a helpful "guard" brought him some water to drink).

The production's final moments callback to that long preshow projection zoom, returning us to the present-day historical site where, standing apart from the ensemble, a ghostly Leo and Lucille watch as a young 21st-century couple (the prologue's Confederate Soldier and Young Woman, in modern dress) settles down to a picnic lunch some yards from the memorial plaque, which they don't seem to notice.  The downstage projection surface provides a terse postscript:

"In 2019, Leo Frank's case was reopened by the Fulton County District Attorney's office."
"It is still ongoing."

[scenicdesign71]

In case the lack of faces in the full "tutorial" above is too frustrating, this clip from the show's YouTube channel provides at least some closeup footage of the opening number (production B-roll, alternating with studio footage taken during the recording of the revival cast album):

[scenicdesign71]

Hooray!   

Playbill:  Tony-Winning Parade Revival Will Tour in 2025

Officially launching in January 2025 from the Orpheum Theatre in Minneapolis, after tech and initial performances at Proctors in Schenectady.
Further cities, dates and casting TBA.