A Tony-winning musical that tells the tragic, frustrating story about a Jewish man who was likely wrongly accused of murder and convicted on flimsy evidence in the Jim Crow South has just landed at SF's Orpheum Theater.

Complicated, historic tragedies like the story of Leo Frank are usually the stuff of opera, or of serious, non-musical theater. But the 1998 musical Parade, with music and lyrics by Jason Robert Brown (The Bridges of Madison County) and a book by Alfred Uhry, dramatizes the accusation, trial, conviction, two-year imprisonment, and extra-legal lynching of Frank — whose case remains something of a stain on Georgia's legal history.

Max Chernin ably steps into the role of Frank, after Ben Platt was Tony-nominated for the role for the 2023 revival on Broadway — which took home awards for Best Revival and Best Direction of a Musical for director Michael Arden. And Arden's direction remains a highlight of this production as it begins its US tour, with innovative staging that places much of this large cast onstage — sometimes seated in chairs around an elevated central platform. It's as if the show itself were doubling as a community morality play being performed during a civic celebration, with stars-and-stripes bunting surrounding the stage.

Projections on the rear scrim of the stage show slides with photographs and names of the historic figures in the story, which helps to keep track of the sprawling cast.

The lengthy first act of Parade keeps up a break-neck pace at it tells Frank's story up until his conviction for the 1913 murder of 13-year-old Mary Phagan, who was an employee at the pencil factory he managed. Her murder takes place on Confederate Memorial Day, a holiday that is still celebrated in some southern states (but not Georgia) commemorating the 285,000 Confederate soldiers who died in the Civil War. A slightly awkward and not well explained framing device depicts a young Confederate soldier heading off to war in 1863, and then shows him as an older man 1913, preparing to march in the Confederate Memorial Day parade.

In a light-opera vein, the first act is largely sung-through and relays the story of Leo Frank and his wife Lucille (Talia Suskauer) as they unwittingly become the victims of venomous antisemitism and a political environment in which railroading a Black person was less expedient than railroading a northerner and a Jew. The District Attorney of Fulton County, played by Andrew Samonsky, is a central villain of the story, recruiting and coaching witnesses, in some cases Black people under threat of incarceration, in order to get a conviction.

The second act tells the story of the complicated aftermath of the trial, in which Frank appeals his case, and Governor John Slaton defies political pressure to quickly have Frank executed. In fact, Slaton would become convinced by 1915 that Frank's trial was rigged, and he commuted Frank's sentence. But a group of jailers and other men would ultimately pull Frank from his cell and lynch him anyway.

Projections let us know that Frank received a posthumous pardon decades later, and that the Phagan muder case was reopened in Fulton County over 100 years later, in 2019.

While Parade can feel like a bit of a slog at times, with an extended section that feels like an episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit set to some less-than-melodic music, its second act redeems it. Two sumptuous and lovely ballads serve as double 11 o'clock numbers: the first, "This Is Not Over Yet," gives Chernin the first time to really show off his beautiful tenor voice; and this show's famous duet between Leo and Lucille, "All the Wasted Time" is heart-stoppingly great, and Chernin and Suskauer's voices are well matched and deliver powerful harmonies.

It is also very much a complex show for sophisticated lovers of musicals, with an often haunting score. A refrain introduced at the top of the show, "The Old Red Hills of Home," becomes an ominous dirge, emblematic of entrenched racism, fear, and hate, by the time it's reprised at the close of Act II. And musicals don't often reach conclusions this stirring and raw.

'Parade' plays through June 8 at the Orpheum Theater. Find tickets here.