All-star cast heads to Tucson with 'To Kill A Mockingbird'

Richard Thomas would proudly put up the role of Atticus Finch in Aaron Sorkin’s “To Kill A Mockingbird” to any of Shakespeare’s great characters.

Sorkin also gets props from Thomas for the play’s language in another comparison to the great Bard.

“His ear for the Southern music and cadences, it was so easy to learn this great part because it just drops into your ear and sensibilities so easily. The language is really delicious,” said Thomas, who plays the lawyer/father Atticus Finch in the Broadway tour of “To Kill A Mockingbird”; it comes to Centennial Hall with Broadway In Tucson for a six-day run beginning Tuesday, Jan. 17.

Sorkin wrote the play based on Harper Lee‘s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name that tells the story of a small-town Southern lawyer defending a Black man wrongfully accused of raping a white woman. Atticus Finch lives by an unmovable set of virtues and sense of right and wrong in the pursuit of justice. His work, though, often leaves little time for and plenty of disconnect with his two children, daughter Scout and son Jem.

In the novel, Lee casts Scout as the narrator and antagonist, recalling the memory of her widowed father defending the Black fieldhand Tom Robinson in the fictional small and racist Southern town of Macomb. The story was loosely based on Lee’s memories of her own father, a small town Southern lawyer who often took on cases of African-Americans.

In his 2018 play, Sorkin shifts the antagonist role to Finch, which Thomas said adds layers of humanity beyond what we saw in the Academy Award-winning 1962 film starring Gregory Peck.

“In the film, he appears not only a little bit unknown but also unteachable because he has these unassailable virtues that carry him through. So what Aaron decided to do is to make Atticus the protagonist of the play and give him a journey,” the 71-year-old Thomas explained. “ … What he did so beautifully was that he took all these beautiful unassailable virtues that we associate with Atticus Finch and interrogated every one of them. His idealism. His sense of what community is. His feelings about the essential goodness of people. His idea of how institutions work and his sense of nobility, which is replaced by a character who has a great deal of modesty and humility and — maybe it’s the stage animal in me — he’s given him a wonderful sense of humor, the most welcome thing of all. It’s very funny in many ways, especially in the first act. And he’s given Atticus some very dry, Southern sense of humor, which an actor can use to bring the audience closer.”

Sorkin also lets us see and feel more from Tom Robinson (played by Yaegel T. Welch) and the Finch family cook Calpurnia (Jacqueline Williams), who is, in essence, co-parenting Scout and Jem with Atticus in the absence of his wife. And in some way, we also get to see what drives the townfolk who stand in judgement of Robinson.

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“(Sorkin’s) dialect is so sharp and so brilliant. He has given the antagonists their own arguments. He is explaining ways about how they are also products of their society and they have grievances, particularly the daughter. So he’s humanized them,” said Thomas, who calls New Mexico home. “Aaron has done an amazing job of maintaining the spirit of Harper Lee, but really looking at the story through our lens. ... When you are reinterpreting a classic of any kind you are going to bring a contemporary lens into it.”

This is Thomas’s third Broadway show tour and he admits Atticus Finch is one of his favorite characters.

“He (Sorkin) has certainly created a wonderful and fantastic role in Atticus Finch. It’s big, it’s complicated. It’s grueling and it’s exhilarating. It really takes the audience to the bases. It’s a beautiful role,” said Thomas, who started his career in the early 1970s playing John Boy on the CBS series “The Waltons” and has appeared in a number of stage productions including lead roles in works by Shakespeare.

In addition to Welch and Williams, Thomas is supported by an impressive cast that includes Broadway and TV regulars Melanie Moore as Scout Finch, Justin Mark as Jem Finch, Steven Lee Johnson as Dill Harris and Mary Badham, an Oscar nominee for playing Scout in the 1962 “To Kill a Mockingbird” film, as Mrs. Dubose.

“Everybody is so excellent. It’s such a deep bench and absolutely worthy of (a Broadway premiere),” said Thomas.

This is the first time Thomas will take a Tucson stage since he appeared with his “Waltons” costar Michael Learned in “Confidentially, Chaikovski” with Chamber Music Plus in 2013.