 | |||
| | ||
| |||
 | |||
|
|
|
|
|||||||||||||||
 
For our privacy policy,
For our user agree-
Copyright 1999 |
 
FOR THE STAR-LEDGER
NEW YORK -- When playwright Alfred Uhry was growing up in Atlanta during the 1940s, nobody would talk to him about Leo Frank.
"Frank's name was always hush-hush," says Uhry, whose tender drama of Southern life, "Driving Miss Daisy," won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize and, a year later, the Academy Award for best film. "My grandmother and her sisters would purse their lips, and I would say, 'Who was Leo Frank?' And they would say 'never mind.'"
But this Thursday, when the new musical, "Parade," opens at Lincoln Center's Vivian Beaumont Theater -- with the veteran Hal Prince directing, music and lyrics by Jason Robert Brown, and Uhry authoring the book -- he will finally tell the tale that has obsessed him all these years.
"It's not a pretty story," says the 61-year-old Uhry, interviewed one morning in the Beaumont's sun-drenched lobby. "But it's a good story."
In 1913, 27-year-old Leo Frank was living in Atlanta, with his wife, Lucille, and working as a supervisor in a pencil factory.
On Confederate Memorial Day, a holiday marked in Atlanta by a lavish parade, somebody murdered 13-year-old Mary Phagan, who worked at the factory and had gone there to collect her pay. The police arrested Frank. A Jew and a Northerner (he was born in Brooklyn and educated at Cornell University), he was the ultimate outsider and quickly became a scapegoat. The evidence was thin, testimony coerced, but the jury convicted Frank. And when Georgia's governor commuted the hanging sentence to life on a prison farm, Frank was abducted and lynched.
The case devastated families of German-Jewish descent, like Uhry's, many of whom had lived in Atlanta since the Civil War. Uhry's maternal great-uncle, Sigmund Montag, owned the pencil factory, and the family stood by Frank during and after the trial. "They weren't considered Southern anymore," explains the playwright. "They were just Jews. People broke their windows, and they had to leave town for a bit. That hurt them deeply. After (the trial), the Ku Klux Klan started up again. It became anti-Jew, anti-black."
Despite the serious subject, Uhry was not the only one whose heartbeat accelerated at hearing the tale. About six years ago, when Uhry and Prince first discussed collaborating on a musical, the director of innovative shows like "Cabaret," "Sweeney Todd" and "Kiss of the Spider Woman" also became enamored.
"I've gravitated toward subjects about which people say, 'That doesn't sound like a musical,'" says Prince, who is billed as the show's co-conceiver. "When Alfred mentioned this story, I immediately thought, 'That seems exactly like what I want to do.'"
One of Uhry's big challenges was writing the character of Frank, who was an unlikely hero according to the playwright's research. "He wasn't a John Wayne figure," says Uhry. "He was pretty uptight and persnickety and unpleasant to his staff. Easy to dislike. He freaked out when he saw (Mary Phagan's) body and started taking off his clothes.
"But he was a very brave man, when put to the test. What's moving about him is that he became a hero. Men who were at the lynching reported that he defended himself in such a simple way, there was an argument about letting him go."
Frank's relationship with his wife strengthened after he was jailed, and that romantic tie became the musical's central thread. "From reading their letters, I got the idea it was a dry marriage," says Uhry. "Frank was very censorious. But by the time he was in the prison farm, he was calling her 'dearest honey.' It's probably not true that they got to make love on the prison floor (as they do in the musical), but we wanted to show that they fell in love with each other in the face of adversity.
"The most important conceptual decision," says Prince, "was to tell parallel stories. To tell a love story that is as strong as the historical story. A relationship in stasis, that is then reinvented by two people, is what makes the show work."
With "Parade," Uhry returns to his first theatrical love: musicals.
He recalls being entranced at about 9 years old by a traveling company of Rodgers and Hammerstein's "Carousel." Shortly after, he accompanied his father on a business trip to New York City, where they saw Ethel Merman in "Annie Get Your Gun."
"I remember sitting there and thinking, 'Okay, this is what I want to do all my life.' What did I know?"
Indeed, after moving to New York in 1959 and marrying his college sweetheart, Uhry pursued a musical theater career with only middling success. Although a protégé of the Broadway composer and lyricist Frank Loesser, Uhry mostly ended up writing lyrics for advertising jingles.
In 1968 he teamed with friend and composer Robert Waldman to write lyrics for a Broadway musical based on John Steinbeck's torrid novel, "East of Eden." (A young playwright named Terrence McNally wrote the book.) Titled "Here's Where I Belong," the show opened and closed in one night.
In 1976 Uhry did strike artistic and commercial gold with his musical retelling of Eudora Welty's romantic novella, "The Robber Bridegroom." But his career foundered again, and in the mid-1980s, while in Miami nursing his lyrics for a musical about the gangster Al Capone, he literally threw in the towel.
"I felt nothing about Al Capone," says Uhry. "Nothing. One morning I was shaving, and it was like an epiphany. I met my eyes and thought, 'I don't want to do this anymore.'"
He wrote to please himself. From the depths of his Atlanta childhood flowed "Driving Miss Daisy," about a feisty, elderly Southerner and her friendship with her African-American chauffeur. Then came "The Last Night of Ballyhoo," which portrays an elite Jewish family in the South (much like Uhry's) at the end of the 1930s. (It won the 1997 Tony Award for best play.) And now, in what is unquestionably his darkest journey into his Jewish and Southern roots: "Parade."
"I don't know why," says Uhry, "but I go back there. I had a lot to work out. Never having been to a Seder, for instance. My wife, Joanna, is Episcopalian. Our four daughters were raised as nothing. I have things to work out, and I guess this was my way of doing it."
Uhry the Southerner was determined that the South be portrayed sympathetically, despite its flaws. "I didn't want to have some noble Jewish person brought down by virulent redneck idiots. Because the South suffered a lot, and I feel it. I remember hearing about the deprivations to people who fought the Civil War. And 'Parade' is only 50 years later.
"The ones that came home lost their farms, their mortgages, because they couldn't pay the taxes. Their sons were forced to move to town and work in factories, and the factories were owned by Yankees and Jews."
But after many years of laboring over musicals, Uhry says that audiences catching these subtleties is less important than their being entertained. "I really believe that's the purpose of theater. If you take something away with you, that's fine. But you have to be involved for a couple of hours."
Most importantly, he has learned, and told, the story of Leo Frank.
|
