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Last summer, 2025, during the height of the Kennedy Center controversy, Parade arrived in Washington, D.C. The musical presents Leo Frank as the central martyr figure of an early 20th-century murder case in Atlanta, repeating the now-familiar modern tagline that historians supposedly agree he was wrongfully convicted of the 1913 murder of thirteen-year-old Mary Phagan. After Georgia Governor John M. Slaton commuted Frank’s death sentence to life in prison, Frank was abducted from the state prison farm at Milledgeville, driven back to Marietta and lynched by a group of prominent men who called themselves the Vigilance Committee.
Before the show opened in D.C., Parade was moved from the Kennedy Center’s Opera House to the smaller Eisenhower Theater, a venue less than half its size, after weak ticket sales and a nearly empty house. Reason described the production as a powerful exploration of antisemitism, media malpractice, racial dynamics in the South, and tribalism, the kind of complicated story supposedly built to rise above partisan divisions. What Reason does not mention is the real-life anti-Gentile framing, the anti-Black racism used by Frank’s own defense, or the fact that every court that reviewed the trial declined to overturn the verdict.
And that is exactly the problem. Parade is subversive theater because it tries to humanize and rehabilitate Leo Frank, a rapist and child molester, the convicted killer in the homicide of thirteen-year-old Mary Phagan. The musical asks the audience to feel sympathy for Leo Frank first, while the dead child at the center of the case is pushed into the background. It turns a murder case with sworn testimony, physical evidence, police statements, and appellate rulings into a sentimental victimology fable about Jewish persecution by Southern White Christians.
The official record that Parade avoids is much uglier than the stage version. The prosecution and state witnesses depicted Frank as a married factory superintendent with a sordid private life, a philanderer who betrayed his wife, pursued improper sexual access inside the factory, and was connected in testimony and press accounts to factory forewoman Rebecca Carson, described by critics of Leo Frank as a paramour. Jim Conley testified that Leo Frank mocked Lucille behind her back as his “Big Fat Wife,” but in the Broadway play, they fall in love. The record also contains allegations about prostitutes being contacted through Frank’s office telephone and brought into the factory. Those details do not fit the sanitized stage portrait of Leo and Lucille as a tragic romantic couple, so the theater version leaves the audience with a polished martyr instead of the sexual predator and accused pedophile described in the testimony around the case.
The same problem appears in the handling of Newt Lee and Jim Conley. Parade turns the case into a Jewish victimhood drama, but the actual investigation began with discovering efforts by Leo Frank to implicate Newt Lee, the Black night watchman who discovered Mary Phagan’s body. The death notes unmistakably pointed toward Lee. The forged time card Leo Frank constructed was designed to implicate Lee, and the later bloodstained shirt found at Lee’s home was designed to fasten suspicion on him before the case shifted to Leo Frank becoming the prime suspect. When that racist railroading engineered by Leo Frank against Lee failed, Frank’s defense turned its fire on Jim Conley, the admitted accessory after the fact, and leaned into the racial contempt of the period, using Blackness itself as a weapon against Conley’s credibility.
The so-called consensus of activist historians is not some neutral mountain of settled truth. Much of it is the product of Leo Frank’s cult defenders, including coreligionist advocates and political agitators, who transformed the case into a Jews-versus-Gentiles morality play instead of grappling seriously with the trial testimony. The actual record is far more stubborn than the stage version. It includes Mary Phagan’s movements from her home to the factory, Monteen Stover’s testimony, Jim Conley’s statements, the death notes, the factory evidence, Frank’s own changing explanations, the effort to blame Newt Lee, and the verdict upheld by the courts of Georgia and reviewed all the way to the United States Supreme Court.
Yet, in practice, Parade played to a thin house. The glowing language around the musical in the mainstream press could not hide the empty seats. The show was not just theater. It was another stage version of the modern Leo Frank rehabilitation narrative, stripped of the weight of the actual legal records, and wrapped in the woke moral vocabulary of the present day.
Reference:
Binion, Billy. (2026, June 5). Trump’s failed Kennedy Center takeover shows why art and government don’t mix. Reason. https://reason.com/2026/06/05/trumps-failed-kennedy-center-takeover-shows-why-art-and-government-dont-mix/