Parade Features Brilliant Actors and Storytelling on Stage

ries of other characters within the play. The song that got me into the musical, “That’s What He Said,” is not sung by Frank but instead is performed by witness Jim Conley (Alex Joseph Grayson) when he takes the stand against Frank and spins the story of how Frank committed the murder and tried to get away with it. Not only were the vocals from Grayson knee-shakingly good, but the ensemble did a masterful job voicing a public opinion. This was especially exciting to me because so much of this case in real life was decided and led by the media and public opinion within the South, and many songs reflect this. “Big News,” sung by reporter Britt Craig (Jay Armstrong Johnson), shows how biased journalism swayed public opinion against Frank. Additionally, the song “Twenty Miles from Marietta” shows the local prosecutor Hugh Dorsey (Paul Alexander Nolan) slandering Frank and creating evidence and stories to vilify him to the jury.

The song, however, that made me realize Parade would be my next obsession for the rest of the semester was “Rumblinʼ and a Rollinʼ.” As an Africana Studies major who is personally invested in African-American history of the 1900s, I had one thought in the back of my head throughout the first act: how interesting that this case was getting so much attention during a time when Black American citizens were being