By Robert Israel

The sprawling cast — 30-plus players — under Michael Arden’s direction performs with verve; they deliver outstanding performances and have excellent singing chops.

Parade, book by Alfred Uhry, music and lyrics by Jason Robert Brown. Directed by Michael Arden. At the Emerson Colonial Theatre, 106 Boylston St., Boston, through March 23.

A scene from the revival of the New York City Center production of Parade. Photo: Joan Marcus

The revival of the New York City Center production of Parade now at the Colonial deserves multiple superlatives. The sprawling cast — 30-plus players — under Michael Arden’s direction performs with verve; they deliver outstanding performances and have excellent singing chops. Alfred Uhry’s book, along with Jason Robert Brown’s musical orchestrations and Dane Laffrey’s set, wondrously takes us back to a dark chapter of American history — to 1913-1915 in Atlanta. Then it returns us to our present day to question all we’ve gained and lost.

On the one hand, the evening is a sickening story about our society’s embrace of antisemitism, the triumphs of mob violence, mendacity, and cowardice. Yet it also celebrates the radiance of love, reminding us that the human race may not be completely lost.

Parade taps into the true story of Jewish-American Leo Frank, who was accused of murdering Mary Phagan, a 13-year-old girl. In the sweep of a two-act, over two hour span, we witness his arrest and imprisonment, his trial in a court of law (he is wrongly found guilty and sentenced to death by hanging) and, finally, even though his sentence is commuted, see how he becomes a victim of mob violence.

Black Panther Minister of Information H. Rap Brown once defined violence “as American as cherry pie.” Slices of that bloody pie were served aplenty throughout the 19^th and 20^th centuries. Parade‘s opening song, “The Old Red Hills of Home,” dramatizes how that mayhem was rooted in the fight against slavery in the Civil War, underlining the high price we pay for our disdain for our collective humanity. The cruelty of the ways we treated Blacks and others in minority communities was a carryover from that war, a sadism that helped drive vigilante justice.

What the musical does not do effectively is to show how many rallied in protest. The Frank trial awakened Americans to speak out against those kinds of atrocities. In 1939, jazz artist Billie Holiday decried the lynching of Black men in the South in her song “Strange Fruit”. (“Southern trees bear a strange fruit/Blood on the leaves and blood at the root/Black bodies swinging in the Southern breeze/Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.”) In the wake of the Frank lynching, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) was founded to protect citizens from racial and religious hatred.

Still, despite protest songs and lobbying groups and even intervention by the Supreme Court, mob violence has proliferated, and not just in Southern states. In 1920 three Black circus workers, accused of raping a white woman, were lynched in Duluth, Minn., not far from Bob Dylan’s childhood home of Hibbing, an abomination he later immortalized in the opening line of his 1965 song, “Desolation Row”. (“They’re selling postcards of the hanging,” Dylan wrote, referring to photographic images of the murders sold as souvenir postcards.)

As for the production, kudos for the lead players – Max Chernin (Leo Frank) and Talia Suskauer (Lucille Frank). The pair take us, with skill and passion, into the Franks’ no-frills marriage, their embrace of Judaism, and, ultimately, their struggle with a society that does not accept or respect them. I was especially moved by the jailhouse “picnic” scene, when Lucille smuggles in home-cooked food. The set visualizes the reverie of an American pastoral scene — only to have that background vanish and the barred windows of Leo’s squalid conditions return.

That striking juxtaposition occurs again at the final curtain. Leo Frank is seen as more than a long ago memory. Parade stirs us to bear witness to the fact that little has changed. The evidence is clear: just watch a video of the dangerous mob in Washington, D.C, on January 6, 2021, spurred on by Donald Trump; the thugs who chanted “Hang Mike Pence” as they eyed a hasty gallows erected on the Capitol steps. (Pence managed to escape via a Secret Service limousine parked in the Capitol basement). Trump pardoned some of the murderous culprits in January this year.

No getaway car was waiting in 1915 when a vicious mob came for Leo Frank. We leave the Colonial with images emblazoned in our minds, pictures projected on the backstage wall — photographs that became postcards of Frank’s disfigured body as it hung from a tree.

Robert Israel, a contributing Arts Fuse writer since 2013, can be reached at risrael_97@yahoo.com.