Platt believes ‘Parade’ ‘piece for right in this very moment’
There’s so much darkness awaiting Ben Platt in his new Broadway role that he has countered with a dash of brightness.
“I painted my dressing room pink so that it’s a very bright and warm and joyful place to be, so that I can leave what happens on the stage on the stage,” he says.
Platt deserves all the joy he can grab while playing the doomed lead antihero in the musical “Parade,” adapted from a true story that took place in Atlanta just before World War I.
He plays Leo Frank, a Brooklyn-born Jewish factory manager falsely accused of murdering a young girl. He is tried and convicted, has his death sentence commuted but then is lynched by a Southern mob who dislikes his religion and Northern values.
“It’s really a human story about how people — because of the traumas of their past — can’t escape the prejudice of their present,” says the show’s director, Michael Arden.
The musical is being revived on Broadway just as the nation endures another wave of antisemitism, which has brought darkness even to the theater’s front door. The show’s first preview was marred by a few neo-nazi protesters outside.
That has only proven to Platt and the rest of the “Parade” team that bringing this musical back in front of an audience is the right thing to do in the face of bigotry and bullying.
“I think both in terms of specifically antisemitism and in terms of just the horrors of social media and online mob mentality, it feels all too contemporary,” Platt says. “I think everybody could feel very palpably that this was the piece for right in this very moment and that there was really a reason to be doing it.”
This is Platt’s first return to Broadway since his star-making turn in “Dear Evan Hansen,” which earned him a Tony and a Grammy and propelled his career to TV shows such as “The Politician” and a record deal.
The new musical opens March 16.
Platt calls “Parade” a “hidden gem” in musical theater and grew up listening to its songs. It was mostly well-received by critics in 1998 when it first arrived — and later won Tonys for best book and score — but closed within a few months, despite a story by “Driving Miss Daisy” writer Alfred Uhry and music and lyrics by multiple Tony winner Jason Robert Brown. Platt says it was ahead of its time.
“I think maybe people just weren’t ready to hear it at that point,” Platt says. “There’s a lot of gray in the show, and it’s also a piece that holds racism and antisemitism in the same conversation and highlights that they are both products, particularly in America, of the same system of white supremacy.”
Behind the legal drama, there is a second — the story of two people, Frank