Parade, Southwark Playhouse - review

Solid bond: Alastair Brookshaw as Leo and Laura Pitt-Pulford as Lucille
10 April 2012

If the Fringe is planning to offer a better production than this in 2011, it's going to have to work mighty hard between now and Christmas.

Southwark Playhouse's tinglingly atmospheric new vault space is the perfect home for Parade (1998), Jason Robert Brown's unashamedly sophisticated modern classic of musical theatre that examines complex currents of racism and anti-Semitism in the Atlanta of 1913.

Anyone who thinks musicals are all jazz hands and doing the show right here will have every preconception shattered. Brown unfurls a score of shifting richness, where jagged anthems - Where Will You Stand When the Flood Comes? has been a favourite on my iPod since the Donmar's 2007 production - alternate with haunting melodies. Yet this potent source material would have been wasted had director Thom Southerland not staged it so lucidly across a two-tier traverse set and coaxed such glorious singing out of every member of his impeccable 15-strong ensemble.

Leo Frank (Alastair Brookshaw), Brooklyn Jew and perennial Atlanta outsider, stands accused of the murder of 13-year-old employee Mary Phagan. A hostile establishment ensures his trial is anything but free and fair and for too long his wife Lucille (hugely impressive Laura Pitt-Pulford) is the only person convinced of his innocence. Alongside eye-catching themes of race and intolerance runs their touching love story, as each learns to cherish the other. A triumph for all concerned, not least lovers of quality theatre.

Until September 17 (020 7407 0234, southwarkplayhouse.co.uk).

Parade
Southwark Playhouse
Shipwright Yard, corner of Tooley Street and Bermondsey Street, SE1 2TF

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