To Kill a Mockingbird (Broadway Touring) at Music Hall, Kansas City MO (2023-10-24 through 10/29)

This mockingbird can “sing”–

It’s the season opener for PNC Broadway in Kansas City’s 2023-24 season and it gets underway with a bang, with the Broadway touring production of “To Kill a Mockingbird”. The drama is based on the 1960 Harper Lee Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, refreshed with a stage play written by Academy Award winner Aaron Sorkin, and has showings through the weekend at The Music Hall in downtown Kansas City.

The classic tale centers around small town Alabama lawyer and widower, Atticus Finch, who honorably tries to defend a black man falsely accused of rape in the 1930s Jim Crow South. The Tony Award-winning Bartlett Sher provides the play’s direction.

Sorkin is best known for his writing on TV’s acclaimed “The West Wing” as well as films like “A Few Good Men,” “Moneyball” and “The Social Network,” but decided to take his version of “To Kill a Mockingbird” to Broadway in 2018, with Jeff Daniels originally in the lead role. It became the highest-grossing American play in Broadway history, before closing prematurely due to the pandemic.

In March 2022, the production went out on tour, with Richard Thomas cast as Finch, known from the long-running TV family drama, "The Waltons”; and now at age 72, looks similar to Sorkin himself (if he could act as well as he writes, and) if he donned the famous tan three-piece suit.

The legendary version of Finch was depicted in the 1962 film, starring Gregory Peck, whose demeanor was more stoic, steadfast, and maybe too iconic (but still deservedly won the Best Actor Oscar). This modern version is more relatable and sublime, with Thomas playing a more humble and human version, humorous and is maybe more believable as a single father.

Thomas has worked on stage since age seven and won an Emmy in 1973 for his Waltons role, and last performed at this same venue in 2008, with the touring company of “12 Angry Men” and is a good fit for the role, based more on the Lee novel, than the film.

Two other cast surprises help make the show worth seeing- actress Melanie Moore steps (back) into the key role of Scout Finch, originating it on tour, then stepping back to get married and pursue other ventures, before recently returning. Her Scout is restless and full of plucky vigor, like a young Taryn Manning or Amy Poehler might have been, growing up,

Mary Badham, who played Scout in that 1962 film and would be nominated for an Oscar, returns as Mrs. Henry Dubose, the Finch’s mean neighbor, whose few lines are ironically mostly derogatory, towards the character she herself played sixty years ago.

Sorkin has chosen the Finch children and their young friend Dill, as the narrators and the trio who will hold the story together. There is also a deeper relationship between Finch and housekeeper Calpurnia, who relate more as siblings and friends, than employer and employee.

The character of Tom Robinson, the man defended by Finch is defined in a greater sense versus the film as well, and the intensity of the trial gradually increases during the first act, before bubbling over shortly after the second act opens.

The dramatic edge that Sorkin usually brings to his scripts, is well-used here, and the social and ethical issues of six decades ago, are still prevalent and brought back further into the light, magnified via Sorkin’s updating.

Staging and lighting, while seemingly simple, were both actually more complicated than they might first appear to be- ideal but unassuming hues, stage transitions, and color palettes that all emanate a similar unspoken power, enhancing these versions of the characters that inhabit the setting.

Whether the story is new to you, or you’re more than familiar with the novel and film version, this version of “To Kill a Mockingbird” is an effective refresh that keeps the core themes of the original work, while reminding us how much more we need to evolve as a civilized society, over six decades later.

 ((National Tour Photos by Julieta Cervantes were provided) / Click on any image to enlarge and see in full)