Reviews OWE & Fringe Published 18 August 2011

Parade

Southwark Playhouse ⋄ 10 August – 17 September 2011

Jason Robert Brown’s bombastic musical.

Stewart Pringle

Jailhouse rock. Photo: Annabel Vere

Presented 96 years to the day from the death of Jewish factory superintendent Leo Frank, Jason Robert Brown’s bombastic musical bio-drama threatens to shatter the masonry of the Southwark Playhouse’s vaults, burying Network Rail’s nefarious plans along with it. Following the triumphant success of Company earlier this year, the ambitious and laudable venue has here chosen a more difficult and far less rewarding musical. It may have swept the awards season in 1999, and it contains some virtuoso writing, but Parade cannot make up for a paucity of ideas with mawkish sentiment and hot air.

Leo Frank has moved from cool and logical Brooklyn to Atlanta, and a south which is still raw with defeat and deeply suspicious of the withdrawn, European sensibilities of the Jewish Yankee. When a 13-year old girl is raped and murdered in the basement of a factory, Frank finds himself a convenient scapegoat in a town already glutted with black lynchings. Small-town politics and incipient anti-Semitism combine to drag the hapless innocent through a kangaroo court who despise him for his success and his strangeness. The Civil war is a constant presence, the narrative framed against subsequent confederate days, with the blood-red flag raised high over the injustices which the town commits.

These are heady and challenging themes, and would require a far more delicate presentation than Jason Robert Brown has afforded them. Every song builds to a climax so overwhelming and euphoric that within half an hour emotions are numb, ear-drums are perforates and pleasure receptors entirely burnt out. Constantly soaring in a never-ending stream of peaks, there is scarcely a quiet moment for reflection or emotional ambiguity. Themes are painted in great, sweaty strokes and good and evil made as plain as pantomime. Songs are usually multi-layered and multi-vocal, but consistently build to crushingly pat melodic climaxes. At times it feels like the trial scenes from The Crucible reimagined as a Disney Animated Classic. Brown gestures to the remaining inequalities faced by black Americans, to the rage which still boils following the defeat of the south, but these are never explored. Worse, Brown and Uhry undermine these concerns in other moments in which racial and national stereotypes are deployed carelessly and insensitively.

This is all the more unfortunate because the Southwark’s production, directed with skill and gusto by Thom Southerland, is brilliantly polished. Southerland matches the relentless energy of the score with a staging which barely pauses for breath. Presented in traverse, and matched by a simple but effective design by John Risebero, Parade is a consolidation of the unlikely potential the Southwark shows for musical theatre. Tim Jackson’s choreography is a true highlight, with the 15-strong cast tumbling, marching and dancing with effortless fluidity through Brown’s tightly-packed score. Each scene popping sharply from that which preceded it, there isn’t an inch of slack in Parade‘s staging. These high-standards are reflected in the cast too, with a solid central performance by Alastair Brookshaw and a number of other stand-outs. Terry Doe, though admittedly gifted with the musical’s best and most inventive songs, overflows with charisma and guarded threat.

Unfortunately, the cast is ultimately hampered by the sound design, which is fatally misconceived and exacerbates the problems of the score. With radio mics turned up to 11 and a cast belting every line as if to the back of the London Palladium, the sheer volume of Parade’s constant crescendos is deafening. When the dim lyrics hector rather than move, it’s hard to feel anything but irritation at such an earth-shaking rendition.

As booming and mawkish as Les Miserables, though not half as fun, Brown and Uhry transform a senseless crime into a musical interested only in the sensation of euphoria. Despite a production which could teach many West-End shows a trick or two, Parade leaves you with little more than a headache.

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Stewart Pringle

Writer of this and that and critic for here and there. Artistic director of the Old Red Lion Theatre.

Parade Show Info


Directed by Thom Southerland

Cast includes Alastair Brookshaw, Laura Pitt-Pulford, Simon Bailey, Mark Inscoe, Kelly Agbowu, Jessica Bastick-Vines, Michael Cotton, Terry Doe, Natalie Green, David Haydn, Abiona Omonua, Philip Rham, Samantha Seager, Victoria Serra, Samuel J Weir

Original Music Jason Robert Brown

Link http://southwarkplayhouse.co.uk/

Running Time 2hrs 30 mins (including interval)

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