‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ Closes, Another Casualty of the Pandemic - Frequent Business Traveler

The cast of "To Kill a Mockingbird" at the Shubert Theater

The play "To Kill a Mockingbird," a stage adaptation of the highly regarded Harper Lee novel., won't reopen after pressing pause in January of this year.

The hit Broadway show closed temporarily twice due to the pandemic, the first time when Broadway theaters were shuttered in March 2020.  It reopened in October of 2021 at its original home, the Shubert Theater, and closed for a second time in January of this year, when New York City was being slammed by the omicron variant.  At the time of its second closing, the producers said it would reopen on June 1 at the Belasco Theater; that later changed to a November 2022 reopening at the Music Box Theater.

Harper Lee's Pulitzer Prize winning and controversial 1960 novel, "To Kill a Mockingbird" – a book that tackles the difficult topic of race in America as well as class, courage, and values – has largely withstood the test of time and book bans over almost seven decades.

To bring "Mockingbird" to the Broadway stage of the late 2010s, however, somewhat of a renovation was required, Jonathan Spira, the magazine's chief theater critic, noted in his review when it opened in late 2018.  It was "a reworking significant enough that the estate of Harper Lee sued the production for having deviated too much from the original version."  In writing the Broadway adaptation, Aaron Sorkin dispensed with the novel's initial focus on a bucolic life in the fictional town of Maycomb, Alabama, and places the courtroom drama front and center, returning to it throughout the show, resulting in a fresh and compelling approach to the classic work, Spira noted.

Sorkin, along with the show's director, Bartlett Sher, e-mailed the cast and crew late Thursday, informing them of the decision to permanently close.  The e-mail placed blame on the show's original lead producer, Scott Rudin, who had stepped out of the limelight after being accused of bullying subordinates.

"At the last moment, Scott reinserted himself as producer and for reasons which are, frankly, incomprehensible to us both, he stopped the play from reopening," the two wrote in the message, which was viewed by Frequent Business Traveler.

In a separate e-mail to Barlett and Sorkin, Rudin blamed the decision on the current economic climate in the Broadway world, which has not recovered to pre-pandemic levels.

Broadway grosses and attendance have both declined since the start of the 2022-2023 season.  Weekly grosses fell below the $30 million mark in the past two weeks, after rebounding at the end of the 2021-2022 season at the end of May.

(Photo: Accura Media Group)