Saturday, December 15, 2018

Miss and hit …

… ‘Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, a New Play by Aaron Sorkin’ and ‘A Child’s Christmas in Wales’ Reviews: Perils and Perks of Reworking Classics - WSJ. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

The producers of what is officially known as “Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, a New Play by Aaron Sorkin” have broken with custom by choosing not to make the script available to critics. At press time, they had supplied no explanation for their decision, though I can’t help but wonder whether they did so in order to make it harder for us to compare the play to the novel by quoting from it at length in our reviews. Whatever their reasons, you’ll just have to trust me when I tell you that Mr. Sorkin has taken Atticus Finch (Jeff Daniels), the idealistic small-town Alabama lawyer who dares to defend a black man (Gbenga Akinnagbe) falsely accused of raping a white girl (Erin Wilhelmi), and turned him into a naïve fool. 
f you’re searching for a child-friendly holiday show based on a modern classic, permit me to send you instead to the Irish Repertory Theatre’s revival of Charlotte Moore’s 1996 stage version of “A Child’s Christmas in Wales,” which is both faithful in spirit to Dylan Thomas’s 1950 prose poem and as sweetly moving in its own unassuming right as the first act of George Balanchine’s celebrated version of “The Nutcracker.”


Also from dave: To Kill a Mockingbird was voted by viewers as America’s #1 best-loved novel in The Great American Read.

 

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