What Ben Platt learned reading Leo Frank's letters

The Forward: Eight times a week, Ben Platt spends around 15 minutes writing onstage at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre in the musical Parade. Somehow he knew he should be writing in cursive. Confined to a jail cell in the role of Leo Frank, Platt jots down whatever’s going through his head in the moment — that the audience is good that night, that his co-star Micaela Diamond made him laugh in the previous scene, that a song went really well. As Platt writes, in a notebook he hopes to keep at the end of the show’s run, his character is fighting for his life.