Broadway revival of Parade features photos of real-life characters and locations (photo by Joan Marcus)
I have a problem with endings.
It seems that I just can’t remember how books, movies, television shows, and plays conclude, shortly after I experience them. I’m talking just a few days later sometimes.
It’s both good and bad. It’s frustrating and embarrassing, but it also allows me to enjoy them all over again.
I often think of an old joke from acerbic deadpan comic Steven Wright: “I was watching football with my ninety-two-year-old grandfather. A team got a touchdown and they show the replay; he thought they got another one. I was gonna tell him but then I figured the game he was watching was better.”
When I go to a revival, even the seventeenth version of a Shakespeare play, I recall many scenes as the show goes on but forget just enough, including the ending, to make it feel like I’m seeing it for the first time. This also happens with movies as well as television series. If I take a few weeks in between episodes, I have to fast forward through the previous one to remember what happened so I can be up-to-date. It infuriates my wife, who can’t believe things fly out of my head so quickly.
I spent months reading Haruki Murakami’s doorstop novels 1Q84 and Killing Commendatore, and while I can recall in detail numerous great scenes, I would not be able to tell you how either one ended. (While I rewatch movies and only a very few TV programs, I don’t reread books, especially if they’re a thousand pages long, so I will never again know what happened to the protagonists unless it is turned into a movie, after which I will forget once more.) I fail to understand how a former publishing colleague of mine would read the last pages of a novel first to decide whether it was worth reading the whole book.
Maybe it has to do with what Frank Herbert once wrote: “There is no real ending. It’s just the place where you stop the story.”
I have no memory of how Eddie Izzard’s solo adaptation of Great Expectations ended (photo by Bruce Glikas)
As a Twilight Zone devotee, I’ve seen some episodes fifty times, but I still don’t always remember the twist at the end. However, so many of them are so fantastic that I don’t hesitate to watch them again even when I know exactly what that last shot is going to be.
I bring the same thought process to plays and musicals that are based on previously existing material. I’ve watched such films as Life of Pi, The Phantom of the Opera, New York, New York, The Harder They Come, and Moulin Rouge!, but I couldn’t tell you how any of them ended. Before I see them onstage, I don’t try to refresh my memory; instead, they are wholly new to me.
This past December, I saw Eddie Izzard’s solo adaptation of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations; I’m just sitting down to watch the new Hulu limited series, and I have no idea what becomes of Pip, Estella, Miss Havisham, and the rest.
There are a few works in which I know the final moment very well, such as Ibsen’s A Doll’s House and the film version of Some Like It Hot, and I am then disappointed when a new production changes a finale significantly, as in the current Doll’s House revival and the musical version of Some Like It Hot — in my opinion not for the better. (Go see the former but skip the latter.)
For shows based on real life, I try not to recall too many historical details, no matter how famous the characters and events might be. I don’t want to know in advance which wives of Henry VIII were beheaded, divorced, or survived. I push to the far reaches of my mind what ultimately happened to Alexander Hamilton and what occurred at the Second Continental Congress in 1776. I opted not to check out the website of photographer Larry Sultan so that I could go in fresh to see Pictures from Home. When watching the new Crucible prequel The Good John Proctor, I had no recollection of the fates of the characters at the Salem Witch Trials. I even made a concerted effort to forget what songs Tina Turner, Michael Jackson, Neil Diamond, and the Temptations are beloved for so I could be surprised scene after scene at those bio-musicals.
Which brings me to Parade, running at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre through August 6. It tells the true story of Leo Frank, a Jewish superintendent at the National Pencil Company who is accused of murdering a young girl in Marietta, Georgia, in 1913. The musical features a book by Pulitzer Prize winner Alfred Uhry (Driving Miss Daisy) — whose great-uncle owned the company at the time — with music and lyrics by Jason Robert Brown. The original 1998 Broadway production received nine Tony nominations, winning two, for book and score.
Steven Wright discusses watching football with his grandfather at the eighty-two-second mark
As you enter the theater, projections on the stage include the memorial plaque put up by the Georgia Historical Society, the Jewish American Society for Historic Preservation, and Temple Kol Emeth in 2007, which lists the injustices suffered by Frank. I did everything I could to avoid reading the plaque, as if it were a tabula rasa, so I wouldn’t know what was about to unfold. I deftly averted all previews and reviews; I was a blank slate. To further the reality and importance of the story, the prerecorded announcement telling us to turn off our phones was delivered by Georgia senator the Reverend Raphael Warnock, and photographs of the actual characters, newspaper articles, and locations appear on the rear wall.
I was deeply discouraged by the first act. During intermission, my wife and I, along with a friend sitting across the aisle, asked the same question: “Why is this a musical?” The much, much better second act answered that for us by focusing on the love story between Leo, who was born in Texas and raised in New York City, and his devoted spouse, the Atlanta-born Jewish southern belle Lucille Selig.
Because I didn’t know what became of Leo, Lucille, Governor John M. Slaton, District Attorney Hugh Dorsey, factory sweeper Jim Conley, newspaper editor and publisher Tom Watson, and reporter Britt Craig, I was shocked again and again by Leo’s mistreatment at the hands of genteel (and gentile) Georgia society.
I don’t know how I would have reacted if I were more familiar with the events — obviously, the production wants the audience to know in advance, since they zero in on the plaque several times before the show starts — but I am completely satisfied with my decision to remain unaware. When I post my review, I will not give anything away. And I am unlikely to forget the ending, which brings us up-to-date with the case as of 2023, sending me home with one final jolt.
But that doesn’t mean the next time I see Parade I won’t think that my team hasn’t just scored another touchdown, leading me to jump up for joy again, the game I’m watching better than the one you are, especially if you don’t remind me that I’ve seen it before.
"I was deeply discouraged by the first act. During intermission, my wife and I, along with a friend sitting across the aisle, asked the same question: “Why is this a musical?” Mark, there are absolutely no limits to what they will make into a musical. I remember there was a musical, "Titanic", and another musical based on the elaborate hats that women wear to church on Sunday (I am not making that up). I am waiting for "Auschwitz: The Musical", "9/11: The Musical", and of course, Larry David's "Fatwa: The Musical" to hit Broadway within the next few years.