“To Kill a Mockingbird,” Aaron Sorkin’s acclaimed stage adaptation of the Harper Lee novel, will not reopen on Broadway following a dispute between the creators and disgraced producer Scott Rudin.
Thursday night saw Sorkin, the playwright, and Bartlett Sher, the director, inform the members of the production that the Tony-winning play will not be resumed after several hiatuses. The New York Times reported.
Emails obtained by the Times show that Sorkin and Bartlett claimed Rudin caused the shutdown. After being accused of bullying and physical abuse, the producer had stopped working on the show as an official representative since April. Rudin still holds the rights to the stage version of the classic text.
“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,”Sorkin, Sher and others wrote to the cast.
The “heartbroken”Duo said that they continued to “mourn the loss of all the jobs — onstage, backstage, and front of house – that just disappeared.”
Rudin explained in a Friday email that the play had been relaunched. “too risky”The current Broadway market is not recovering from the pandemic.
“The reason I opted not to bring back TKAM has to do with my lack of confidence in the climate for plays next winter,” Rudin wrote. “I do not believe that a remount of Mockingbird would have been competitive in the marketplace.”
The Shubert Theater hosted the show’s hit production in late 2018. It was put on hold when the pandemic of March 2020 struck. The production reopened the next October, but star Jeff Daniels had to leave in January. Greg Kinnear was appointed to replace him as Atticus, but declining ticket sales due to the pandemic resurgence forced the production into a second hiatus. A third relaunch originally scheduled for June 1 at Belasco Theater was moved to November 2 at Music Box Theater.
According to the Times, the Broadway play’s closure will not affect other showings of “To Kill a Mockingbird.” The production opened on London’s West End in March, as did a U.S. national tour in Boston a month later.
Showbiz411First reported that the show would be shut down.
The production was contacted for comment.
