Review: Poignant and pungent, ‘Parade’ launches its national tour in Minneapolis

So much for starting the new year on an up note.

“Parade,” Jason Robert Brown’s driving, morose musical about the lynching of a white factory manager in Georgia more than a century ago, launched its 32-city national tour Wednesday in Minneapolis.

The opening was high-wattage: Brown and director Michael Arden were at full attention in the audience at the Orpheum Theatre. It was also high-stakes, as the forces at play in this show, including mob violence and officials’ cynical use of a terrible crime to underscore a problematic social order, resonate so clearly.

Thousands of Americans were lynched from Reconstruction through the 1960s in orgies of violence and blood that devastated families and communities. The overwhelming majority of victims were Black but there were others, as well, and “Parade,” which premiered in 1998 under the direction of co-conceiver Harold Prince, lifts up one notable exception.

Leo Frank, a Jew from Brooklyn, was charged in 1913 with the rape and murder of 13-year-old Mary Phagan of Marietta, Ga. He was the last person to see her alive.

The book, by “Driving Miss Daisy” playwright Alfred Uhry, is plodding and melodramatic and features what feels like strange, heartfelt paeans to the Confederacy. The story is told in docudrama style, with dates and historic photographs projected onto a backwall where Mary Phagan also appears from time to time, lit beatifically.

Brown’s compositions, restructured for this Tony-winning 2023 revival, are from the Sondheim school. They are clever, purpose-built and austere, shying away from sweetness and pleasure.

Arden and his cast amp up the emotion of the story, which plays out like a ritual on and around a massive multipurpose platform festooned with bunting. The podium serves as judicial bench, governor’s mansion and, inexorably, the gallows.

On Broadway, Leo and Lucille Frank were played by Ben Platt and Micaela Diamond. Max Chernin, who was a Leo standby in that Broadway cast, does the honors here opposite Talia Suskauer (Elphaba in “Wicked”). They own the show, even if Chernin’s Leo is still remote because of his high-handedness.

“Confederate Memorial Day is asinine,” he tells his wife, clueless about the power of story and myth. “Why would anyone want to celebrate losing a war?” Still, Chernin ably guides us through his journey to be more relatable, even as it comes too late.

Suskauer is the real star of the show, delivering with heart and polish even as Lucille’s powers are diminished and underestimated by her own husband. Suskauer helps Lucille bloom into a quiet and devoted powerhouse.

For my money, the supporting cast is worthy of celebration. Ramone Nelson is soulful and funny as janitor Jim Conley. Andrew Samonsky is butter smooth as prosecutor Hugh Dorsey. The actor, like the show itself, marries charm with blithe manipulation. After Dorsey stokes public anger over the tragedy of Phagan’s death, he then points to that clamor for justice for his own ends.

And he wants us to cheer him on as he orchestrates this miscarriage of justice.

When: 7:30 p.m. Thu.-Fri., 2 & 7:30 p.m. Sat., 1 & 6:30 p.m. Sun.

Where: Orpheum Theatre, 910 Hennepin Av. S., Mpls.

Tickets: $40-$129 at hennepinarts.org.