Parade

i just got the cd, and am listening to it. Was the show just as amazing as the recording? I think this is one of my new fave OBCR.

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Imagine the audio along with a visual! Really good! Carmello and Romano...awsome!

Everytime I hear L5Y on BWW Radio I get this incredible urge to get a credit card so I can buy it online. I have resisted so far. Son/gunn+credit card=financial ruin I know I could never to a credit card. I'll be a debit card boy. (Which reminds me I've been meaning to get one.)

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"The Old Red Hills of Home" was my addiction for about 3 weeks after I got Parade. What a song.

I figured it didn't last because the content was so heavy.

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I loved Parade. I thought it was beautifully staged and designed, and Carolee Carmello and Brent Carver were excellent. I think there's probably a flaw just built into the material. As much as its about Leo's trial and the events surrounding it, the show is about two cold people learning they need and love each other. That emotional quadrant of the show kicks in very late in Act Two, and that was probably too late in the game for general audiences to feel involved with the proceedings. But certain things in the score, the performances and the staging will stick with me for life.

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I figured it didn't last because the content was so heavy.

Many people say that what brought Parade down was its book. I haven't seen it, but from what the reviews I've read, most of the show's weaknesses stem from its plodding, unimaginative and flawed narrative structure. It would be great if this work was revisited with a new book; I think the material is rich.

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"It Don't Make Sense" is the only song that has ever made me bawl my eyes out just listening to the OBCR. It's one of my favorite cast recordings I own. Just gorgeous music.

Another problem: I think Parade probably made gentile audiences very uncomfortable. Depictions of anti-Semitism in a work like Cabaret, for example, is easier to digest, because it's set in Berlin in the 1930s, and gentile audiences can say, oh, how terrible, and feel comfortably removed from culpability. The depiction of the latent anti-Semitism of the Deep South (and America by a larger token), is much harder to dismiss. Such images as the townspeople performing a jubilant cakewalk as Frank is unaccountably found guilty, or the virulence of such numbers as "Where Will You Stand When the Flood Comes?" and "That's What He Said" or the depiction of Frank's lynching were also similarly unsettling. It's all a part of the underside of America's history, but I can understand if non-Jews found Parade tough going.

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