Parade on Broadway Starring Ben Platt and Micaela Diamond

Emmy, Grammy, and Tony Award winner Ben Platt (Dear Evan Hansen) returns to the New York stage as Leo Frank alongside Micaela Diamond (The Cher Show) as Lucille Frank in this starry Gala presentation of the Jason Robert Brown (Songs for a New World) and Alfred Uhry (Driving Miss Daisy) musical. Inspired by historical events, Parade follows the Franks—a Jewish couple living in Marietta, Georgia—as they’re pulled apart and drawn together by Leo’s 1913 murder trial, conviction, appeal, and eventual lynching. Brutal legal drama contrasts with haunting pastoral lyricism as an unlikely love story unfolds—a unique blend of tones that won both Brown and Uhry Tony Awards (for Original Score and Book respectively).

Big news! Dear Evan Hansen's Ben Platt and The Cher Show's Micaela Diamond star in the first Broadway revival of Jason Robert Brown and Alfred Uhry's Parade. Get Parade tickets on TodayTix, and see these two 2023 Tony-nominated stars.

The Parade musical is based on actual historical events: The lead character, Leo Frank (Platt), was a factory manager in 1913 Georgia accused of assaulting and murdering a 13-year-old factory worker. The show follows Frank through his trial, imprisonment, and eventual lynching as a result of the anti-Semitism that Frank's criminalization unleashed. With an emotional script and songs that incorporate folk, gospel, blues, and pop-rock, Parade explores the roles the sensational media, the public, and Frank himself played in the outcome of the event, and the effects it had on Frank's marriage.

Parade was Brown's first Broadway show, and it would lead to a successful career that also produced Broadway musicals like 13 and The Bridges of Madison County. (His other best-known work, The Last Five Years, has never run on Broadway.)

Parade on Broadway only ran for two months between 1998-99, but it won Brown and Uhry the Tony Awards for Best Original Score and Best Book, respectively. The show got seven other nominations, including Best Musical.

In 2022, Parade was included in New York City Center's Encores! season; the program mounts musicals that don't get revived often. Platt also starred in that six-day run, and that production is the one now on Broadway. It earned six 2023 Tony Award nominations, including Best Musical Revival and Best Direction of a Musical for Michael Arden.

Get tickets to Parade in New York on TodayTix now.

What to Watch For

• Parade bookwriter Alfred Uhry has a personal connection to the story: His great uncle owned the pencil factory Leo Frank oversaw.
• Uhry achieved his greatest success with the 1988 Pulitzer-winning Driving Miss Daisy.
• Jason Robert Brown conducted the musical himself for the New York City Center run.
• In the City Center production, Platt sat on stage for the entire intermission each night, in character as Frank in jail.
• Director Harold Prince initially asked Stephen Sondheim to write the Parade score, but he declined. Prince's daughter recommended Brown, and the rest is history!
• Another modern classic musical, Chicago, is also about American media sensationalizing crime. Like Parade, that musical is also based on real events, though more loosely.
• When Parade passes by...again! Fifty years before this Parade premiered, a 1935 musical/sketch revue with the same name went up on Broadway. There's no relation between the two.