April 6, 2023

"It's brutal": Leo Frank and true crime at the theater

A conversation with Adam Grosswirth about "Parade"

the true crime that's worth your time

Switching up the format today, as we do from time to time, with an interview of sorts with our esteemed colleague Adam Grosswirth. “Musical Theatre Smartie/True Crime Dummy” (his words, not mine!) Adam agreed to give me his perspective on Parade, a show I’d seen reviewed in a recent New Yorker that, per the review’s subhed, “revisits the charged trial of Leo Frank.”

The review also opens by wondering how well “modern theatregoers…know the story” of that case:

It’s been more than a century since Frank, the Jewish superintendent of an Atlanta pencil factory, was accused of the sexual assault and murder of thirteen-year-old Mary Phagan, railroaded into a guilty verdict, tantalized with the possibility of an appeal, then kidnapped from prison and lynched in Marietta, Georgia. At the time, the overt display of Southern antisemitism—crowds outside the courthouse where he was tried screamed “Hang the Jew!”—shocked the country. Some rose up against it: Frank’s ordeal spurred the formation of the Anti-Defamation League, for example. But it also helped fuel the revival of the Ku Klux Klan.

So…you know, not the first thing that comes to mind when I’m thinking of potential real-life musical-theatre stories. Or the hundredth. How the campy hell is a production supposed to set that multi-pronged horror to music?

But I’ve had a similar “THAT case? with…tap shoes. yiiiikes” discussion with Adam before, on an episode of The Blotter Presents in which Adam and his fellow Smash-ologists Tara Ariano and Kevin O’Keeffe joined me to spitball which true-crime cases we wanted to see (or, in a few cases, had seen) in musical form.

In a DM convo the other day, Adam and I talked about that pod ep; Parade’s best songs; narrative suspense vs. conventional wisdom; and compelling parts of the IRL case that don’t translate. I’ve edited our discussion very lightly for clarity.

Adam Grosswirth: It’s probably not your thing but both recordings of Parade are very good imo if you want me to point you to a couple of representative tracks.

Sarah D. Bunting: A couple of representative tracks would be very useful!

…Okay, what we actually did [in the TBP episode] was a King Of The Mountain game where the panel decided which theoretical case “...: The Musical” would move on. The Zodiac case won. That said, it has often seemed like every time I slot a given case into a joke as too tawdry or gruesome to get adapted for the genre, I’m told (often by...you) that someone has at least attempted it. And I have the same two-part reaction almost every time: first, that it’s really tasteless to map belting/choreo onto, like, the crimes of Ted Bundy...but then my second reaction is through the lens of something YOU said when we were co-recapping Cop Rock back in the day (god help us), that you have to believe a musical’s characters MUST express whatever they're feeling in song/dance form, vs. merely speaking. And it does seem like some of the tragedy and horror of true-crime cases might find its “best” expression in a song/recitative.

But with ALL OF THAT said, and with my not having realized that the Mary Phagan case had become a musical, my knee-jerk reaction to its adaptation in the musical-theater genre was “oh NO.” Multiple axes of bigotry, the assault and murder of a minor, literal feces as key evidence...I just struggled with believing any production could manage it without tipping into tacky immediately and permanently.

Okay, well, they did not mention the feces, at least not in song (if it’s in the dialogue I don't recall).

It’s extremely NOT Cop Rock. The only numbers that are musicals!: one early on before the murder with Mary and one of her friends, a fantasy number about Leo which is meant to be unsettling, and a party scene at the governor’s mansion (that Lucille interrupts). They’re necessary levity in a BLEAK evening but yeah no, nobody is tapping about a lynching or child rape.

(The feces are too long to explain but also point to the other prime suspect, so I was wondering how/whether the show incorporated that.)

The Old Red Hills of Home: A young soldier goes off to the Civil War, then we jump ahead to the “present” and he's old, minus a leg, and it’s Confederate Memorial Day, the day of the murder.

How Can I Call This Home: Our intro to Leo.

The Factory Girls/Come Up To My Office: The girls’ testimony and Leo enacting that testimony. I LOVE how this being a musical tells you they’ve been coached, because they’re all saying/singing the exact same thing. (This comes back really cleverly in Act 2.) I could be misremembering but I remember the original production feeling ambiguous about Leo here, though, like he could have done it. Platt plays it/is directed like “isn’t this ridiculous?” which I think is less interesting.

It’s Hard to Speak My Heart: Leo’s testimony. (Is this true? Did he testify?)

Rumblin’ and a-Rollin’: Servants at the Governor’s mansion are like “oh sure, all these New Yorkers are going to come down here and try to stop this white boy from getting hanged.” (Which is an interesting way to handle that because we never actually see those people, and there also aren’t a ton of Black voices in the show.)

All The Wasted Time: Leo and Lucille after Leo is moved to another location and think it’s going to be okay. Maybe just listen to the end here? In the finale we jump ahead and the boy who was the last person (besides Leo) to see Mary alive is going off to fight in WWI and there’s this musical moment that always kills me before I’m like “wait they’re the baddies!”

(Original cast album if you’re anti-Platt:

It’s unclear to me whether Frank testified in his own defense.

In the show it’s more of a personal statement than a testimony, I guess.

I don’t know the case especially well, but my sense is that the defense team didn’t think [the other prime suspect/presumed actual murderer, Jim] Conley’s (clearly coached/compromised) testimony would “work” on a jury of that time/place, and they operated from that assumption.

Oh, that’s a pretty great number in the show, too, actually. Literal showstopper.

No idea what relationship it bears to the actual history but it’s a great way to musicalize it. Conley is portrayed as fully understanding his place in all of this, including the role he has to play as a black man, so he puts on a SHOW.

The New Yorker review calls Grayson “astonishing.”

He really is. In Act 2 he ends up on a chain gang anyway and the Governor comes to talk to him about the testimony and he’s like “bitch, I’m already here, why would I help you?”

Subscribe to Thursday Evening Money

The more I think about it, the more I think that this case and cases LIKE it might be perfectly suited for musical theater — because so much of criminal justice is about the construction and marketing of a narrative.

For context, here’s Bill James on Jim Conley in the hardcover edition of Popular Crime:

...Jim Conley was extremely convincing on the stand. He told a story that was complex, nuanced, intricate and rich in detail. He stuck to that story through days of intense cross-examination by excellent lawyers. He was a fantastic liar. To the people of the South in that era, nurtured in the belief that blacks were congenitally stupid, it was inconceivable that a black man could outsmart the police and the jury. Yes, he was an alcoholic. Yes, he was lazy and dishonest. Yes, he was a career criminal. Yes, he was uneducated. Yes, he lived normally in filth and squalor. But he was also clever.

So I think the meta narrative here — as if this case needed another one — is about the retailing of stereotypes about Black artistry, as well.

It just seems like SUCH an impossibly tiny needle to thread!

Yeah and not for nothing with an all-white creative team (the writers, but also the directors of both New York productions...Jews, though! And Alfred Uhry’s whole thing was Atlanta).

Jason Robert Brown is really exceptional at writing in different musical styles and he deploys that so well here. He does a military/national anthem for Memorial Day, gospel, minstrel, jazz, and then “modern” (1998) musical theater when it makes sense. Leo’s last words are the prayer the sh’ma, in Hebrew, but he sets it to the same melody as “Old Red Hills of Home.” It’s brutal.

Helen Shaw pointed to that as the “one wrenching moment that smashed through [her] sense of remove” from the show. Shaw couldn't quite figure out why the “thought-provoking complexity” of the story, on paper and in “the play’s imagination,” wasn’t truly moving until that point (theories include the crowded set and some struggling with accents). I take it your emotional experience with it was more direct?

It was but I also saw it 25 years ago and have been listening to it regularly since. I agree that this set is a disaster. The second act is flabby (there are rewrites and also the original album is incomplete — it doesn’t have the dialogue of course but also not all the music); I’m not sure how much I just didn’t remember and how much was the production’s fault.

They really make it VERY clear in this version that he didn’t do it, and I could be misremembering but I thought it was more ambiguous. I certainly think that’s more interesting. So then when most of Act 2 is Lucille and Slaton investigating, it’s like “WE KNOW!” (In Act 1, I mean...by the end, yes, it should be clear he didn’t do it.)

I didn’t send you the songs because they’re blah but there’s a lot of interesting stuff about the press, too. The reporter character (who I assume is a composite?) is pretty terrible. That seemed more blatant, too, but also I don’t like his songs so I never listen to them.

Uhry apparently “says he’s ninety-nine percent sure that the real killer” was Conley; Shaw adds that “Arden's production seems to wonder if that’s the right proportion.”

Meaning it should be 100? Or did Shaw think maybe Leo?

Evidently Uhry’s nana played cards with Mrs. Frank? ...I think Shaw means that UHRY means it should be more like 95, based on a line in a sign that’s highlighted in a set projection.

Oh, gotcha. City Center is very high and I was in the mezzanine and couldn’t actually see most of the projections!

If I had to guess, not knowing the creative team at all, that’s just not wanting to cede suspense, even if it’s a tiny wisp.

Yeah, but then he directs all this mugging in “Come Up To My Office.” It’s weird!

But most audience members won’t know the case qua case, so that’s unnecessary; audiences who DO know the case understand Frank’s innocence as received wisdom. So, weird to be coy about that but whatever, MY nana didn’t play pinochle with case figures so...

That’s an interesting thing about the show vs. the history: it portrays the Franks as these total weirdo outcasts for being Jewish in Atlanta, but there was (and is) a HUGE Jewish community. Leo sings about it. “These Jews are not like Jews. I thought that Jews were Jews but I was wrong.” HE’S an outcast as a Yankee. But Lucille has community. We never ever meet any of them.

That’s sort of where the press comes in -- that the larger story became a re-litigating of “the war of northern aggression” once the northern papers got hold of the case. Which evidently was almost unimaginably huge, like to a Lindbergh/OJ degree. There’s probably another, separate show about that aspect of it as well.

That’s even more relevant to today’s culture-war framing of suspect “coastal elites” versus Real Folks. Still: not a beehive I would even look at, much less stick my arm into with rhyming lyrics.

Yeah, they do a good job of portraying that in the show, even without showing the Brooklynites. There’s the reporter, the evangelist, etc. — the kid who had a crush on Mary who’s just ANGRY. You can see how he just wants someone to blame. Slaton just wants to do the right thing and still get reelected. I don’t like how the DA is portrayed as flatly eeeeeeeviiiiiiiillllll, even though he probably was. It’s just not that interesting dramatically.

You could make the argument that the audience needs someone unambiguous to attach to in that regard, but...no shortage of villains in this story, let’s face it.

Yeah, and just dramaturgically speaking it makes a lot of Act 2 kinda dull if we already know everything Lucille is learning.

hahaha! One more question, then I’ll let you go: Do you think the show works, or works as well, for people who do know the case, or is it better to go in “cold”?

Hard to say because I only know the case from the show. The storytelling is solid. They do a really nice job of establishing the time, place, and players, and digesting a lot of information. And it does that emotional manipulation thing musicals do so well that I love — which can be really effective in this context because it shows how the jury is manipulated, too. But I imagine enough is “wrong” that, like with any historical adaptation, if you know it too well you’d be like “hey that’s not what happened!” (Though I wonder if the real-life ambiguity is helpful here.)

Something else that resonates now (and in 1998, and which if it isn’t true to the real trial transcripts and coverage definitely feels believable!) is this idea that isn’t it just awful that this poor innocent child and her poor innocent mother were forced by cruel circumstance to move from the country to the big bad city where she had to go work in a horrible factory (I mean, yes, that part does suck). Very “make America great again,” the factory itself killed her, and these big-city Jews run the factory. Mary’s mother sings “my child will forgive me for raising her poor...when we’re reunited at last.”

That’s something that tends to get lost in present-day conversations about the case, actually.

I mean, they could’ve made it up. — SDB and AG

Coming up on Best Evidence: Raniere loses another one, Nixon in exile, and your true-crime weekends.

What is this thing? This should help. Follow Best Evidence @bestevidencefyi on Instagram, email us at editorial at bestevidence dot fyi, or call or text us any time at 919-75-CRIME. And don’t forget to check out our chat for discussion of breaking news!