Review of to kill a mockingbird broadway8/26/2023 ![]() Welch (Tom Robinson), Stephen Elrod, Jacqueline Williams (Calpurnia) and Richard Thomas (Atticus Finch) in the touring production of "To Kill a Mockingbird." (Julieta Cervantes / HANDOUT) And that even includes racists like Bob Ewell (Joey Collins) and his daughter Mayella (Arianna Gayle Stucki, who dives mighty deep into an immensely challenging role). In Sorkin’s adaptation, Calpurnia pushes back hard against one of Atticus’ core beliefs: that there is good in everyone and that a moral person always makes an attempt to empathize with those who seem hostile, to try and understand why they feel the way they do. In Lee’s novel and the Sergel adaptation, they are in essence a surrogate brother and sister. Welch) and significantly changed the relationship between Atticus, the role made famous on film by Gregory Peck, and his domestic helper, Calpurnia (played on the tour by the formidable Chicago actress Jacqueline Williams, revealing to the country a talent we long have known). Sorkin added agency for the Black characters in Lee’s story: specifically, he gave voice to the character of Tom Robinson (the excellent Yaegel T. He was hired by the producer Scott Rudin to make a version of the iconic novel more palatable to the present, to diminish its association with the so-called “white savior” narrative, an element of the novel that has the Black citizens of Maycomb standing in the balcony as their hero departs the courtroom, unsuccessful at that. Sorkin’s version is something else entirely. And by time frame, I don’t so much mean the years between now and 1960, when Lee’s famous work was published, but between now and 2018, when I reviewed director Bartlett Sher’s production on Broadway, and Wednesday when the first national tour arrived in Chicago, starring Richard Thomas. Whatever one’s politics, there is no questioning the diminished trust in the institution, both from without and (as Justice Clarence Thomas recently noted) within. Sitting there Wednesday night, the Supreme Court flashed into my mind, as it surely did elsewhere in the suitably hushed Nederlander Theatre. She has been raised by her father Atticus to see the court as a church or a chapel, an institution fully capable of fixing the injustices that transpire beyond its doors, a place of refuge, of stability, of hope, of equality under the law. But she does so with the reverence of a girl who will grow up to be a lawyer. She looks upon the seat of justice in fictional Maycomb, Alabama, through a child’s eye, of course. Early in Aaron Sorkin’s adaptation of Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird,” young Scout Finch starts telling us about a courtroom.
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