Audio Assignment: Reverse It

The Audio Assignment Reverse It Asks that you take a soundtrack form a musical and rearrange the tracks in order to create a whole new story. Many musicals begin and end in similar places musically, with the finale being a reprisal of some of the main beginning numbers of the Musical, and the case is the same for the musical I chose.

The musical I chose is Parade, which tells the true story of a young Jewish man named Leo Frank who moves to Georgia to run an assembly line in the early 20th century. Leo’s relationship with his wife is strained, and he spends long hours in the factory (it is implied that he focuses on his work to avoid interacting with his wife and the people of Georgia who he finds displeasing). One day, after receiving her pay, one of the girls who worked on the assembly in Leo’s factory is found dead in the basement, and the musical tells the story of how Leo is accused, arrested, tried, convicted, and killed for the crime He didn’t commit.

Now there is a lot of material to use here; One Idea that came to me was to take the final 2 songs of the playlist and put them at the beginning. In this case It would not tell the story of how Leo frank was murdered but instead the story of how he was ultimately exonerated and how he reconciles with his wife. The final 2 songs “Sh’ma” and Finale: “The Old Red Hills Of Home” together discuss how Leo Frank Is broken out of prison by an angry mod and Hanged on a tree outside (because there was a good chance his conviction was going to be overturned), and the aftermath of this event. The musical’s prologue begins just before the civil war, as a soldier from the south is about to head off to battle. The lyrics to “Sh’ma” are actually a Jewish prayer, so had this song been at the beginning rather than the end It would contextualize how soldiers would pray for their lives before combat, and could juxtapose the feelings of a soldier from the worth with those of a soldier form the south.