“All rise!” is the exhortation upon which Aaron Sorkin’s new adaptation of “To Kill a Mockingbird” ends, and, sure enough, before the curtain could completely fall, almost all of the audience at the performance I attended had complied. If nothing else, the rapturous standing ovation affirms the producing acumen that brings Harper Lee’s classic novel to life on stage at this particular American moment. One sensed an almost tangible, nostalgic hunger to once again be comfortingly enfolded in the play’s rhetoric of enduring white liberal moral rectitude. Unfortunately, in this production, the whole never becomes the sum of its very considerable theatrical parts.
Review — To Kill a Mockingbird — BN+ — Miriam Buether — Bartlett Sher — Harper Lee — Aaron Sorkin — Atticus Finch — Jeff Daniels — Celia Keenan-Bolger — Will Pullen — Gideon Glick — Blackbird — Calpurnia — Tom Robinson — Emmy — The Newsroom — Gbenga Akinnagbe — Erin Wilhelmi — Mayella — Bob Ewell — Frederick Weller — LaTanya Richardson Jackson — Adam Guettel — Truman Capote
