I saw an ad on the TV on January 9th for "To Kill a Mockingbird" at the Buell Theater at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts. I had heard and read about the production on Broadway with Jeff Daniels as Atticus Finch and he felt it was the role of his lifetime. It wasn't Jeff Daniels, but "John Boy", Richard Thomas. That was fine, Richard Thomas is an accomplished actor, but it really was the play I wanted to see, not who played Atticus. Which was OK, because the play was about Scout Finch, his daughter, and she was excellent.
Anyway, I immediately got on-line and scanned through available seats. Of all the days that I could go down to Denver, there were maybe a dozen scattered mezzanine and balcony seats available. And the best one was tonight, on the second night of the production, second row back, three seats off the middle. (Frankly, I don't want the front row of the mezzanine or the balcony. My fear of heights inside buildings is still embedded in my DNA and besides, all you see is the railing there. Although we did have first row box seats at the Boston Symphony Hall, and I wouldn't have wanted to be anywhere else.)
The Balcony Level The Mezzanine Level
Now, imagine those with just cabling for the rails.......
I have warm regards for the Temple Buell Theater. I took my ASCE students there in the Fall of 1998 during the reconstruction of the site. They had just finished the steel erection so we were walking around in the orchestra seats when there weren't any seats, in the orchestra pit when the stage was just there and backstage when there wasn't a forestage. But what I really remember was walking around the balcony area when there was still only the construction cable railing and walking down the open stairwell. (We had come up on the construction elevator.) The first performance in the hall was Lyle Lovett in August, 1999.
The building was originally the Denver Auditorium, which I had been to three times as an undergraduate at University of Colorado. The first show was Ike and Tina Turner who were fantastic performers, and they were fronted by an up and coming group called Credence Clearwater Revival. The second show was Cream, Erik Clapton, Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker. Baker was so strung out that the stage crew would walk him out to the drum set, he would go wild while playing the music and then the stage crew would come get him and help him backstage. The third show was CU's choir singing the Verdi Requiem with the Denver Symphony under Brian Priestman. Priestman started dating the soprano, Ford McClave, who was a senior music major at the time (or they may have been married by then, March 1972). (Now ask me what I had for lunch yesterday. I don't know.)
But the play....It was everything I hoped it would be. Of course, you can't take pictures during the play, so I can't show you that. But you can get a feel for the staging and the actors from
this CBS Colorado video. I am not a critic, nor do I know stagecraft nor technique, and I easily fall into the "suspension of disbelief" to watch a play, so I get to enjoy the play without getting too analytical. (Sometimes I wish I could do that with a dam or a foundation!)
There were only two main sets, the front porch of the house and the courtroom. Everything was on rollers or dropped from the sky (the roof of the house), and scene changes were really seamless, taking place while the leads were pulling you away from the movement. In fact, much of the movement was done by the actors themselves, like the courtroom audience carrying their own chairs in. The third set was at the end of the play and was the interior of the house, being a front door, five steps to a platform to form the second floor of the house, with only a bed and a few chairs.
The story is of a black man accused of raping a white girl who is being prompted (and molested) by her father. Atticus Finch is the defense attorney who is reluctant to take on a murder case, but does so because he believes in justice for all, including southern blacks. This is wrapped by the family story of the widower Atticus who is trying to teach his children right from wrong and standing up for justice. The two kids, son Jem (about 10) and daughter Scout(about 6), and their friend Dill(maybe 8) jump back and forth between their younger selves and as adult observers and commentators. Scout really ends up being the main character, even over her father. It's been a long time since I read the book, 9th or 10th grade, but I've read that the ending was modified from the original story. I couldn't tell, it was seamless anyway.
There was a lot of humor in the story, most of it from Atticus, though the kids had some good one-liners also. It was good, since it kept the story from becoming macabre. It was also used to "twist the knife", making a point with humor. And there were a lot of points to be made. Sorkin, the playwright, finished the writing in 2018. There were a number of references made that applied equally to the USA in 1934 and 2023, and not just the south.
Just some observations:
-At several times when important statements were being made about segregation and oppression, people in the audience applauded. Obviously to emphasize and support the point being made, but it was jarring and caused a break in the acting.
-Some of the "southern accents" sounded more like Kathryn Hepburn's Connecticut accent (which after seeing her in Eugene Ionescos's play Rhinoceros, my dad said, "I just can't understand those British accents.) My Lyft driver told me his previous fare said that Richard Thomas sounded more like southern Minnesota.
-Richard Thomas isn't Gregory Peck. And while you want to hear the gravitas of his voice, Thomas's character is different from Peck's. Peck's Atticus was a granite wall of moral certainty and absolute faith in people. Thomas's Atticus starts that way, but by the end, is disillusioned and his faith in humanity is shaken, which the soft spoken Thomas conveyed better.
-The prosecuting attorney kept calling Tom Robinson "boy" throughout his questioning, rather than the more formal and accepted "Mr. Robinson". Atticus kept calling him and objecting out whenever he said it. I'm sure that Richard Thomas had some built in sympathy for that, being known as "John Boy" his entire life.
-The racial slurs and vehemence throughout the play sounded a lot like that which I heard from adults and peers when I was growing up in Houston and especially Conroe. The Klan still held rallies when I was in high school and the vocabulary was still the same. It is a very real play and story.
-Finally, a bit of trivia. The kid character Dill was modeled after a real childhood friend of Harper Lee's named Truman Capote. In later life, Capote encouraged her to write the book and set her up with an agent and a publisher.
-Finally, finally.... The featured drink at the bars was
which sounds a whole lot like a Tequila Sunrise to me.....
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So, since I'm here in Denver and three blocks from the Art Museum, I'm going back over there after breakfast. I especially want to see the "Her Brush" exhibit of Japanese Women artists and spend some time there than I did in November. And my nephew Juhl also recommended some of the new galleries to visit. Then, I'm going to meet him at 2:00 after he has a meeting and have lunch. Luckily, I can leave my car in the hotel parking lot, so I can check my mail before I leave. And I may have more to write about the Art Museum tomorrow, so stay tuned.
(And actually, I didn't write about my day before the play started, so I need to write a pre-quel which will actually start on Sunday, which is why I'm not starting now... Good night!
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