It's not perfect either.Īlthough starring beloved TV icon and Emmy-winning Richard Thomas (John-Boy in The Waltons) who's also a Broadway veteran ( The Little Foxes, 12 Angry Men, Incident at Vichy) and directed by multiple Tony Award-winning golden boy Bartlett Sher ( South Pacific, My Fair Lady, The King and I), Mockingbird is oddly misdirected. But the national tour went forward, and this is the version now playing through April 30 at the Hobby Center. Rudin, no longer involved in the production but who still controlled the rights, suddenly pulled the plug citing dwindling revenue amid rising production costs. When Broadway resumed, the audience wasn't there. The play reopened in 2021, but the resurgence of the pandemic closed it again. Starring Jeff Daniels and an incandescent Celia Keenan-Bolger as Scout, who received a Tony Award for Best Supporting Actress, Sorkin's Broadway play ran headlong into COVID and the shuttering of all theaters in 2020.
Sergel's play was banned except under stringent restrictions. Eventually everyone settled down, edits were agreed to, and the Sorkin adaptation opened on Broadway to rave reviews in 2018 and recouped its reported cost of $7.5 million in four months, repeatedly shattering box office records for a straight play. Lawsuits upon lawsuits followed Rudin was canceled for bullying behavior and at one point Lee's estate sued Sorkin and Rudin for ruining the book. So when Broadway and Hollywood impresario Scott Rudin approached Lee for an update, she concurred. It was tremendously successful but hardly perfect. This focus steered the play away from the first-person portrayal to an outside observer's view. A reverie of sorts, it's narrated by Finch's neighbor Maudie instead of Finch's tomboy daughter Scout, as in the novel and film. The first stage version, penned by Christopher Sergel and premiered in 1991, had been the standard for decades among regional and school theaters.
Academy Award and Emmy-winning writer Sorkin (films: A Few Good Men, The Social Network TV: The West Wing Broadway: Camelot revival that opened last month) took on the challenge to write a new version of Lee's iconic 1960 novel, itself a beloved 1962 Academy Award-winner with Gregory Peck's classic portrayal of small-town lawyer Atticus Finch defending an innocent black man accused of rape in the deepest racist south: Macon, Alabama, 1934. The playbill announces “Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird,” but, truth be told, it's really Aaron Sorkin's Mockingbird.
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