Tom has far more agency here than in the novel or the film he’s not just some lamb led to the slaughter. “I’ll be narrating while also being part of the narrative,” Dill tells the audience, sounding far more like a Sorkin character than a creation of Harper Lee, who, of course, wrote the source novel. They also narrate the action, giving this “Mockingbird” a sort of “Our Town” feel of captured memories with a self-aware twist. The children, including precocious out-of-town visitor Dill (Steven Lee Johnson), are played by adults, with the characters looking back at the events of the play from a distance of some years.

This is an elegantly staged work, directed by Bartlett Sher, with sets that nimbly transform from a spartan, warehouse-like courtroom to the porch of the Finch home, where Atticus’ daughter, Scout (Melanie Moore), and son, Jem (Justin Mark, live with their widowed father. Where: Hobby Center for the Performing Arts, 800 Bagby Street.ĭetails: $40 and up See More Collapse “They’re still our friends and neighbors,” he exclaims of the raving bigots who want to see the defendant, Tom Robinson (Yaegel T. As written by Sorkin, and played by Richard Thomas, this Atticus is naïve, glib, perhaps even delusional in his blinkered optimism. (It also provides a strong argument for the Hobby’s Broadway series to sprinkle in some more non-musical productions). This Atticus was, frankly, kind of boring in his one-note perfection.Īaron Sorkin’s stage adaptation, which premiered on Broadway in 2018 and stops for a brief touring run at Houston’s Hobby Center this week that ends Sunday, provides a bracing departure from the movie’s porcelain god figure. The Atticus Finch best known in the popular imagination was played by Gregory Peck in the 1962 film adaptation of “To Kill a Mockingbird.” This Atticus was a white savior in smalltown ‘30s Alabama, a lawyer of almost impossible nobility defending an innocent Black man against trumped-up charges of raping a young white woman, the kind of accusation used to justify lynchings on a regular basis in the Jim Crow South.

Welch (“Tom Robinson”) and The Company of To Kill a Mockingbird at Hobby Center Julieta Cervantes/Photo: Julieta Cervantes Richard Thomas (“Atticus Finch”), Yaegel T.

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee