Ahead of curtain, and fresh from touring his second studio album, Reverie, Ben Platt spoke to Vogue about the show’s dark and powerful timeliness; working with Arden, Diamond, and Brown; and “returning home” to musical theater.
That helps! Can you tell me a bit about who Leo Frank is to you and whether your appreciation or understanding of him has changed since you first came to know the character and the show?
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think in the lore of this show and the case, and he being a Jew, he’s first and foremost introduced as a victim, and that’s how he is essentially assigned to history. And of course he is, but what I find really interesting and compelling about playing him, both in terms of who he really was and in terms of the show, is that he was not necessarily this warm, easy, nebbishy person all the time.
For me, the key really came in a photograph of him that I saw. There’s a lot of very popular images because there are so few that even exist. But there was a photo that I hadn’t seen before, which was him in the courtroom in the midst of all these people testifying against him, and he looks so much like he’s posturing as this adult, like he’s really working hard to look unaffected.
It’s been a few years since you’ve done a major stage production. How has being in that space again felt as a performer? I think there’s definitely a huge part of me that feels like I’m kind of returning home—you know, I spent the first 20-some years of my life almost exclusively doing this, so it’s definitely where I feel the most comfortable, and it’s such a relieving feeling to return to what I love in the deepest way. But it’s also my first time doing theater since the pandemic. And there’s a lot that has changed culturally in terms of the way that artists are treated and taken care of.
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