![]() ![]() And while Atticus is mostly a civil attorney, he’s persuaded by the judge (a delightful David Manis) to take on the case for fear the court-appointed attorney would do poorly. The injustice at the heart of the story centers on a Black man falsely accused of raping a White woman. Indeed, the opening scene jumps right into the trial, with Scout walking around unseen between the other characters filling us in on the action. Along with her brother Jem (Justin Mark) and a visiting kid named Dill (Steven Lee Johnson), the three run around the vast stage causing mischief while also breaking the fourth wall to comment on the goings on. While the novel positions Atticus’s daughter Scout (Melanie Moore) as the protagonist, the play focuses more on the father while still keeping Scout as a narrator. One of the rare touring Broadway shows to show up at the Buell that’s not a musical, To Kill a Mockingbird has shown that at least some drama can make it big: opening on Broadway in 2018 with Jeff Daniels in the Atticus Finch role, the production went on to earn millions while also running into a number of legal disputes. Some things were left out, some pieces were made larger or smaller, but somehow Sorkin put it all together in ingenious fashion - aided in large part by not worrying too much about chronology to focus instead on how to turn a somewhat quiet novel into a theatrical barn burner. His answer was to take all the many scenes of To Kill a Mockingbird and arrange them like a jigsaw puzzle. The touring Broadway version now at the Denver Center’s Buell Theatre features Richard Thomas in the role of Atticus Finch - a small-town lawyer in 1930s Alabama who doesn’t share the racial animus most of the other townsfolk do toward their Black neighbors.Īs I waited for the curtain to rise on opening night in Denver, I wondered to myself how Sorkin would start things off, how he’d take the many disparate pieces of family life that comprise the bulk of the novel and fit them together with the rape trial set piece at the heart of the story. etc.), a playwright with one of the best ears around for action and dialogue, who took the story and turned it into a stage play that manages to seriously over-deliver in terms of adapted material. Then along comes Aaron Sorkin ( The West Wing, A Few Good Men, etc. I corrected this last year sometime and certainly enjoyed the book - although I can think of quite a few other American novels that stand above it. I’m not sure how but through all the English classes I took throughout high school and college, Harper Lee’s to Kill a Mockingbird had never landed in my lap. ![]() Aaron Sorkin’s adaptation of the classic novel is as powerful as it is timelyĮveryone has some of those big pieces of canon they haven’t read or seen yet. ![]()
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