Theater review: Latté Da, Jewish Theatre join for 'Parade'

Peter Rothstein must have great karma. The artistic director of Theatre Latté Da had planned to produce "Fiddler on the Roof" with Minnesota Jewish Theatre. Then rights were pulled because of a potential tour. It's the best thing that could have happened.

Latté Da and MJTC decided instead to stage "Parade," the musical based on the 1915 lynching of an Atlanta factory foreman. Grim material, yes, but terribly human in its heartbreak, epic in its sense of injustice and sweeping in its pageantry. The show opened Saturday at the History Theatre in St. Paul, with abundant examples of why playwright Alfred Uhry and composer/lyricist Jason Robert Brown won Tonys for best book and score.

Rothstein stages "Parade" with brisk vigor, a wise approach given that Uhry never intended to draw intricate characters. From the moment Shaun Nathan Baer sings an ode to the Old South, perched high on Kate Sutton-Johnson's stockade set, we understand how prejudice hides in pomp.

Dieter Bierbrauer plays Leo Frank, a prickly and fastidious Brooklyn-born Jew who suffers the cultural ostracism of being a Yankee in Georgia. Ann Michels is Lucille Frank, Atlanta-born and more at ease. When a teenage employee is found dead in Leo's factory, the outsider is railroaded by incompetent lawyers, unscrupulous prosecutors and trumped-up accusations fed by a poisonous atmosphere.

Lucille persuades the governor, played with a mix of pomposity and decency by Tod Petersen, to commute Leo's death sentence, but vigilantes overturn the judgment.

What makes "Parade" so satisfying is its surfeit of performance opportunities. It seems every time we turn around, a new player is commanding the stage. Shawn Hamilton plays an ex-con whose sense of self-preservation seals his testimony against Leo. A brash singer with a slashing style, Hamilton electrifies the courtroom. Randy Schmeling takes his spotlight as a scandal-mongering reporter; Nathan Brian has an outstanding voice as the corrupt prosecutor; George Muellner wheezes regret as the judge; Jody Briskey bristles as the decedent's mother, and Kevin Dutcher shuffles through the boozy attorney. None has depth, but with Brown's music as his tool, Uhry conflates history into -- and I'll say it again -- a "Parade."

Bierbrauer and Michels are perfect. Michels summons aching hurt and dignity. Bierbrauer slowly unwinds the tight Leo, and we wish the ending were unmoored from history.

Denise Prosek is spot-on with her musical instincts, Kathy Kohl's costumes pop with color and Michael Matthew Ferrell's choreography is energizing. This is a sad story, but one that needs telling, particularly in such a smartly wrought way.

Graydon Royce • 612-673-7299