Harper Lee’s classic breaks stage records

A stage production of To Kill a Mockingbird adapted by the Hollywood writer Aaron Sorkin and starring Jeff Daniels has made Broadway history by pulling in US$1.7 million (NZ$2.5m) during a week in which records were smashed by a powerful crop of plays and musicals.

Sorkin’s reworking of the famous novel into a courtroom drama that seems to speak to the racial politics of the Trump era broke the record for weekly takings for an American play on the Great White Way.

The takings still fell far short of those achieved by musicals such as Hamilton, which tend to play in larger theatres.

Hamilton also broke new ground in the week between Christmas and New Year, becoming the first show to make more than US$4 million in a week.

To Kill a Mockingbird arrives in the wake of another stage juggernaut, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, which made US$2.5 million, the most brought in by any play in Broadway history.

Daniel Radcliffe, star of the Harry Potter films, was engaged on a separate stage playing a magazine fact-checker in The Lifespan of a Fact – one of four plays to gross over US$1 million.

The adaptation of Harper Lee’s 1960 novel was regarded as a particularly clever feat given the canonical status of the novel in American literature and an author’s estate that sought to halt the play with a lawsuit.

Sorkin, best known as the screenwriter behind The Social Network and A Few Good Men and the political television drama The West Wing, has said he originally thought his role would simply be to add stage directions.

In a radio interview before Christmas, he said his first draft was almost a museum piece: a homage to a story read by generations of schoolchildren.

Its producer, Scott Rudin, told him that it needed to come quickly to the trial that is the climax of the novel, pointing out that Atticus Finch, the lawyer who fights to save an innocent black man from condemnation by an all-white jury in Alabama, needed to change during the play ‘‘to become Atticus’’.

Sorkin said he returned to the text and found flaws in the character that he had originally seen as virtues when he read the story as a child.

‘‘He excuses racism all over the place,’’ Sorkin said. ‘‘He is tolerant of intolerance.’’ – The Times