In 1913, Leo Frank, a Jewish Yankee living in Atlanta, was accused of raping and murdering 13-year-old Mary Phagan, an employee at the National Pencil Factory where Frank worked as the superintendent. He was jailed for two years, then kidnapped and lynched in 1915. So yeah, let's make a musical out of
that, right? In 1998,
Alfred Uhry and
Jason Robert Brown did, and transformed these horrible
real-life series of events into a beautifully scored musical that garnered Tony Awards for best book and best score, though it had a relatively short run of 85 performances. It's a challenging piece, so what better company to stage it than one that seems always up for a challenge -- R-S Theatrics.
The play begins with a young soldier (Zach Wachter) heading off to the Civil War, taking in his views of the "Old Red Hills of Home". Fast forward to 1913, and Atlanta, still bruised from having had their butts kicked almost fifty years earlier, is not a place where Leo Frank (Pete Winfrey), a Jew from Brooklyn, has ever felt comfortable. As an outsider, he aloofly regards the South as "the land that time forgot". His wife Lucille (Jennifer Theby-Quinn), a non-practicing Jew, is happy in her native Georgia and glad she married well, but is still dissatisfied with her lot, and in some ways couldn't seem more different from her husband.
