"To Kill A Mockingbird" to B/Way for 2017/18 (EDIT:Dec2018)
Feb 10, 2016 6:47:08 GMT -5
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Post by jo on Feb 10, 2016 6:47:08 GMT -5
www.nytimes.com/2016/02/11/theater/to-kill-a-mockingbird-is-headed-to-broadway.html?hpw&rref=theater&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region®ion=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well&_r=0
Theater
‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ Is Headed to Broadway
By ALEXANDRA ALTERFEB. 10, 2016
Over the past 55 years, Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” has racked up pretty much every accolade imaginable. It won the Pulitzer Prize and was adapted into an Academy Award-winning film starring Gregory Peck. The book became a commercial blockbuster that sold more than 40 million copies, a staple on school curriculums, and an enduring moral parable about a young girl’s coming of age in an unjust world.
Now, for the first time, it’s coming to Broadway.
The producer Scott Rudin has acquired stage adaptation rights for “To Kill a Mockingbird,” and has hired the screenwriter Aaron Sorkin to adapt the story. Barlett Sher, who won a Tony Award for his revival of the musical “South Pacific,” will direct the play, which is scheduled for the 2017-18 Broadway season.
Mr. Sorkin, who has collaborated with Mr. Rudin on feature films like “The Social Network,” “Moneyball” and “Steve Jobs,” said it was both exhilarating and daunting to tackle such a cherished classic.
“‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ is one of the most revered pieces of 20th century American literature,” Mr. Sorkin said in a telephone interview. “It lives a little bit differently in everybody’s imagination in the way a great novel ought to, and then along I come. I’m not the equal of Harper Lee. No one is.”
The Broadway debut is a new cultural milestone for “Mockingbird,” which in the last year has been overshadowed and diminished by the controversial publication of Ms. Lee’s novel “Go Set a Watchman.”
The release of “Watchman” last summer was clouded by questions over why Ms. Lee, who is 89 and shuns interview requests, suddenly decided to release another book decades after her celebrated debut. Even more troubling for some fans and readers, “Watchman” introduced a radically different version of the lawyer Atticus Finch, the moral center of “Mockingbird” and one of the most beloved figures in American literature.
In “Mockingbird,” which takes place in a small Alabama town during the Great Depression, Atticus is depicted as a gentle scholar who risks his life to defend an unjustly accused black man. That image was undermined by “Watchman,” which portrays Atticus as an aging bigot who rants against his grown-up daughter, Scout, when she argues in favor of racial integration.
Seeing the heroic, principled Atticus played in the flesh could be a balm for “Mockingbird” fans who felt his character was tarnished by “Watchman.”
“The Atticus we do is going to be the Atticus in ‘To Kill a Mockingbird,’” said Mr. Rudin, who noted that no casting decisions have been made about who will play Atticus or any other character. “He’s one of the greatest characters ever created in American literature.”
A new stage production of “Mockingbird” could also animate the novel’s themes of racial injustice and the pervasiveness of bias and inequality — issues that resonate deeply at a moment when the country is wrestling with many of the same problems.
“There’s this hunger for a hero, especially now, when we can’t find one anywhere,” said Claudia Durst Johnson, author of “Understanding To Kill a Mockingbird.” “The play could reinforce the book, just as the movie did.”
Mr. Sher, who signed on to direct the play, said he felt Mr. Sorkin was well matched to the material, and could tease out the contemporary echoes in the novel’s themes.
“It raises so many important cultural, political and social questions that Aaron is well suited to,” Mr. Sher said. “The conversation between Harper Lee and Aaron Sorkin is going to be an interesting one.”
Mr. Rudin isn’t the first producer to bring the story of Atticus and Scout to the stage. The playwright Christopher Sergel’s adaptation of “To Kill a Mockingbird” has been staged countless times in schools and regional theaters across the country. It was staged in London in 2013, in a production starring Robert Sean Leonard as Atticus.
It is especially beloved in Ms. Lee’s hometown, Monroeville, Ala., where volunteers have put on the play every spring for the last 26 years. Ms. Lee and her lawyer, Tonja B. Carter, have taken a more active role in the stage production recently, and created a nonprofit, the Mockingbird Company, to produce the play in Monroeville.
But according to her literary agent, Andrew Nurnberg, Ms. Lee has long been reluctant to sell the professional stage rights, despite entreaties by playwrights and producers.
“While Nelle had always had misgivings about anyone who might want to bring “To Kill a Mockingbird” to Broadway — and there have been many approaches over the years — she finally decided that Scott would be the right person to embrace this,” Mr. Nurnberg said in an email, using the name Ms. Lee goes by among family and friends.
Mr. Rudin, a film and theater producer who is known for aggressively collecting adaptation rights to literary novels, began seeking the Broadway rights for “Mockingbird” two years ago.
“It’s a book I’ve loved my whole life,” he said. “It gets done all over the country because of the title, because of the power of the story.”
After months of negotiations, he acquired rights to stage the play on Broadway and in regional professional theaters, as well as the first-class production rights in London, and national and global touring rights. Dramatic Publishing, the Illinois-based company that licenses Mr. Sergel’s adaptation, will continue to hold nonprofessional theatrical rights.
While Mr. Sergel’s adaptation is meticulously faithful to the original story — almost to a fault, some theater critics have complained — Mr. Sorkin plans to take more liberties. His version will open differently than the novel, and will include new dialogue and fleshed-out scenes that are alluded to in the novel but not fully depicted, he said.
Mr. Sorkin, who is best known for his trademark, machine-gun spray of dialogue in TV shows like “The West Wing” and “The Newsroom,” got his start as a playwright in the 1980s. After he graduated from Syracuse University, one of the ways he taught himself dramatic story structure was by closely studying the 1962 movie of “To Kill a Mockingbird” and comparing it with Ms. Lee’s novel, which he reread repeatedly, he said.
When Mr. Rudin contacted him and asked him if he wanted to write the stage play, he didn’t hesitate. “As daunting a prospect as it is, for so many reasons, this is what you signed up for,” he said.
Now he feels an enormous responsibility to deliver something that will satisfy the novel’s legions of fans, he said. He’s even facing pressure from his teenage daughter, who read the novel for school last year and warned him “not to blow it,” he said.
“You can’t just wrap the original in Bubble Wrap and move it as gently as you can to the stage,” he said. “It’s blasphemous to say it, but at some point, I have to take over.”
Go for it, Hugh Jackman!!
Jo
Theater
‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ Is Headed to Broadway
By ALEXANDRA ALTERFEB. 10, 2016
Over the past 55 years, Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” has racked up pretty much every accolade imaginable. It won the Pulitzer Prize and was adapted into an Academy Award-winning film starring Gregory Peck. The book became a commercial blockbuster that sold more than 40 million copies, a staple on school curriculums, and an enduring moral parable about a young girl’s coming of age in an unjust world.
Now, for the first time, it’s coming to Broadway.
The producer Scott Rudin has acquired stage adaptation rights for “To Kill a Mockingbird,” and has hired the screenwriter Aaron Sorkin to adapt the story. Barlett Sher, who won a Tony Award for his revival of the musical “South Pacific,” will direct the play, which is scheduled for the 2017-18 Broadway season.
Mr. Sorkin, who has collaborated with Mr. Rudin on feature films like “The Social Network,” “Moneyball” and “Steve Jobs,” said it was both exhilarating and daunting to tackle such a cherished classic.
“‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ is one of the most revered pieces of 20th century American literature,” Mr. Sorkin said in a telephone interview. “It lives a little bit differently in everybody’s imagination in the way a great novel ought to, and then along I come. I’m not the equal of Harper Lee. No one is.”
The Broadway debut is a new cultural milestone for “Mockingbird,” which in the last year has been overshadowed and diminished by the controversial publication of Ms. Lee’s novel “Go Set a Watchman.”
The release of “Watchman” last summer was clouded by questions over why Ms. Lee, who is 89 and shuns interview requests, suddenly decided to release another book decades after her celebrated debut. Even more troubling for some fans and readers, “Watchman” introduced a radically different version of the lawyer Atticus Finch, the moral center of “Mockingbird” and one of the most beloved figures in American literature.
In “Mockingbird,” which takes place in a small Alabama town during the Great Depression, Atticus is depicted as a gentle scholar who risks his life to defend an unjustly accused black man. That image was undermined by “Watchman,” which portrays Atticus as an aging bigot who rants against his grown-up daughter, Scout, when she argues in favor of racial integration.
Seeing the heroic, principled Atticus played in the flesh could be a balm for “Mockingbird” fans who felt his character was tarnished by “Watchman.”
“The Atticus we do is going to be the Atticus in ‘To Kill a Mockingbird,’” said Mr. Rudin, who noted that no casting decisions have been made about who will play Atticus or any other character. “He’s one of the greatest characters ever created in American literature.”
A new stage production of “Mockingbird” could also animate the novel’s themes of racial injustice and the pervasiveness of bias and inequality — issues that resonate deeply at a moment when the country is wrestling with many of the same problems.
“There’s this hunger for a hero, especially now, when we can’t find one anywhere,” said Claudia Durst Johnson, author of “Understanding To Kill a Mockingbird.” “The play could reinforce the book, just as the movie did.”
Mr. Sher, who signed on to direct the play, said he felt Mr. Sorkin was well matched to the material, and could tease out the contemporary echoes in the novel’s themes.
“It raises so many important cultural, political and social questions that Aaron is well suited to,” Mr. Sher said. “The conversation between Harper Lee and Aaron Sorkin is going to be an interesting one.”
Mr. Rudin isn’t the first producer to bring the story of Atticus and Scout to the stage. The playwright Christopher Sergel’s adaptation of “To Kill a Mockingbird” has been staged countless times in schools and regional theaters across the country. It was staged in London in 2013, in a production starring Robert Sean Leonard as Atticus.
It is especially beloved in Ms. Lee’s hometown, Monroeville, Ala., where volunteers have put on the play every spring for the last 26 years. Ms. Lee and her lawyer, Tonja B. Carter, have taken a more active role in the stage production recently, and created a nonprofit, the Mockingbird Company, to produce the play in Monroeville.
But according to her literary agent, Andrew Nurnberg, Ms. Lee has long been reluctant to sell the professional stage rights, despite entreaties by playwrights and producers.
“While Nelle had always had misgivings about anyone who might want to bring “To Kill a Mockingbird” to Broadway — and there have been many approaches over the years — she finally decided that Scott would be the right person to embrace this,” Mr. Nurnberg said in an email, using the name Ms. Lee goes by among family and friends.
Mr. Rudin, a film and theater producer who is known for aggressively collecting adaptation rights to literary novels, began seeking the Broadway rights for “Mockingbird” two years ago.
“It’s a book I’ve loved my whole life,” he said. “It gets done all over the country because of the title, because of the power of the story.”
After months of negotiations, he acquired rights to stage the play on Broadway and in regional professional theaters, as well as the first-class production rights in London, and national and global touring rights. Dramatic Publishing, the Illinois-based company that licenses Mr. Sergel’s adaptation, will continue to hold nonprofessional theatrical rights.
While Mr. Sergel’s adaptation is meticulously faithful to the original story — almost to a fault, some theater critics have complained — Mr. Sorkin plans to take more liberties. His version will open differently than the novel, and will include new dialogue and fleshed-out scenes that are alluded to in the novel but not fully depicted, he said.
Mr. Sorkin, who is best known for his trademark, machine-gun spray of dialogue in TV shows like “The West Wing” and “The Newsroom,” got his start as a playwright in the 1980s. After he graduated from Syracuse University, one of the ways he taught himself dramatic story structure was by closely studying the 1962 movie of “To Kill a Mockingbird” and comparing it with Ms. Lee’s novel, which he reread repeatedly, he said.
When Mr. Rudin contacted him and asked him if he wanted to write the stage play, he didn’t hesitate. “As daunting a prospect as it is, for so many reasons, this is what you signed up for,” he said.
Now he feels an enormous responsibility to deliver something that will satisfy the novel’s legions of fans, he said. He’s even facing pressure from his teenage daughter, who read the novel for school last year and warned him “not to blow it,” he said.
“You can’t just wrap the original in Bubble Wrap and move it as gently as you can to the stage,” he said. “It’s blasphemous to say it, but at some point, I have to take over.”
Go for it, Hugh Jackman!!
Jo
