As befitting a literary classic that has never been out of print since its publication in 1960, Harper Lee’s “To Kill A Mockingbird” has attracted an A-list of talents to bring it to the Broadway stage: producer Scott Rudin, director Bartlett Sher, and writer Aaron Sorkin. No casting was announced with the news that the show would be mounted in the 2017-2018 season. But Rudin, an Oscar and multiple Tony Award winner, is one of the most successful producers in Broadway history and can tap a limitless roster of stellar names.“To Kill A Mockingbird” is both the coming-of-age tale of Scout, a young girl making sense of life with her older brother Jem and their friend Dill, and a courtroom drama in which her father, the noble Atticus Finch, is called up to defend a falsely accused black man in the racist South of the 1930s. The fictional town of Maycomb stands in for Lee’s hometown of Monroeville, Alabama, where the incident that inspired the book occurred. An instant critical success, the book has sold over 50 million copies worldwide and is a staple of scholastic curriculum.Two years after its publication, “To Kill A Mockingbird” was made into a film, winning Oscars for Gregory Peck’s portrayal of Atticus Finch and the screenplay by Horton Foote. The latter’s script was faithfully followed when Christopher Sergel wrote a 1991 stage adaptation slated for school and community productions. Interest in a Broadway production was revived recently following a 2009 Hartford Stage production, directed by Michael Wilson, and last year’s London production, directed by Timothy Sheader, at the Barbican Theatre. But Rudin secured the rights from the Lee literary estate to wipe the slate clean and start over with a new team. He couldn’t have chosen better collaborators: Sher has won acclaim for his brilliant direction of the musical revivals of “South Pacific,” “The King and I,” and, most recently, “Fiddler on the Roof.” But more pertinent are his revivals of Clifford Odets’s “Golden Boy” and “Awake and Sing!”, both set, as is “Mockingbird,” in Depression-era America. Sher also has the distinction of being the only non-black director tapped to mount a Broadway production of an August Wilson play; he directed the 2009 revival of “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone,” for which he received one of his six Tony nominations.Aaron Sorkin’s Broadway record is mixed and far more limited. His career was launched with the 1989 hit play, “A Few Good Men,” after which he abandoned the theater to win fame and success in television (“The West Wing”) and films (“Moneyball,” “The Social Network,” “Steve Jobs.”) He returned to Broadway in 2007 with the short-lived drama “The Farnsworth Invention.” The play, about an inventor’s critical and unappreciated role in the development of the television, was set in the 1930s, the era to which Sorkin now returns for “To Kill A Mockingbird.”
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