Adam Guettel's hauntingly doleful score, now prerecorded, creates a welcome contrast to the play's unflagging hopefulness. Meanwhile, Black characters like Tom and Calpurnia (Jacqueline Williams), the Finch family's housekeeper, are relegated largely to positions of stoic dignity and only rarely granted the chance to speak in their own voices.Ī viewer can still appreciate the crisp patter of Sorkin's dialogue, which sounds a lot like the familiar West Wing walk-and-talk with a twang, and many of the original staging's strongest elements still shine on tour. The blatantly racist characters - like Tom's accuser, Mayella Ewell (Arianna Gayle Stucki, who tries heroically to bring dimension to her role), and her vile father Bob (the comically malevolent Joey Collins) - are drawn in such broad caricature that they ultimately allow the viewer to transfer all their discomfort and disgust onto them, without ever questioning the complicity of the other white characters who function in a community that strenuously upholds a bigoted old order. His adoring children, Scout (Melanie Moore) and Jem (Justin Mark), clock the potential hypocrisy in his posturing but ultimately swoon for his self-righteousness. Welch) against the false charge of raping a white woman from one side of his mouth, while preaching tolerance and understanding for his malicious neighbors from the other. In the town of Maycomb, Alabama - where half the population claim membership in the Ku Klux Klan, but we're meant to believe that just as many are really pure of heart - Atticus (Richard Thomas) zealously defends Tom Robinson (Yaegel T. ![]() Sorkin doubles down on the white saviorism of the source text - an attitude that Lee herself even disavowed in her prequel Go Set a Watchman, which was belatedly published in 2015. And while this Mockingbird flew back into the public consciousness just four years ago, its message now seems both antiquated and simplistic. Scenes from contemporary life, where incidents of racism and intolerance have become not only commonplace but brazen, more closely resemble Atticus Finch's admonition about the legacy of the Civil War: that it is bound to be "always yesterday." But theater never exists in a vacuum it needs to meet the moment. This cockeyed optimism feels hollow in 2022, as Bartlett Sher's production begins its national tour amid mounting evidence to the contrary. It imagines a society where morality triumphs over prejudice, where the arc of the moral universe always bends toward justice. It's easy to understand why Aaron Sorkin's adaptation of Harper Lee's classic novel blazed onto Broadway in 2018, becoming the most successful straight play of all time. ![]() To Kill a Mockingbird exists in a world with decency at its center. Richard Thomas as Atticus Finch in the national tour of To Kill a Mockingbird
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