In an act of unprecedented corporate generosity on a grandiose scale, 18,000 or so New York City public school students swept down to Madison Square Garden yesterday afternoon to see not some discounted arena attraction but a top-of-the-line, first-rank, perennially sold-out-at-premium-prices Broadway show. To Kill a Mockingbird, which has been breaking box office records since it began previews in November 2018, did not merely perform a free matinee for the 1,400 or so students who could fit into the Shubert; they picked up the show, moved it 12 blocks south, and plunked it into the home of the Knicks and the Rangers.
This was not a simple throw-the-props-and-costumes-into-the-station-wagon operation. As can be imagined, the playing area had to be stretched across the expanse of the arena. A new, mostly flat stage floor was constructed, some 90 feet wide (as opposed to perhaps 35 feet on Broadway). No scene changes possible, under the circumstances; the courtroom was set at one end, the house unit at the other, with numerous scenes played in between. This arrangement placed most parts of the arena—at least those on the lower levels—within distance of at least some of the action, augmented by live-video closeups on four Madison Square Garden-sized LED screens.
This required the show to be significantly restaged, which seems to have been accomplished handily. Director Bartlett Sher, who did an astonishing job in what couldn’t have been much time, patrolled the perimeter during the performance; at one point he could be seen instructing Nina Grollman and Nick Robinson—adult actors who play Scout and Jem Finch and serve as narrators—like the head coach on the sideline.
The performance was intact, featuring the current Broadway cast. (Ed Harris stars as Atticus Finch, with Grollman, Robinson, LisaGay Hamilton, and Taylor Trensch joining original cast members Dakin Matthews, Neal Huff, Kyle Scatliffe, et al). The show’s two performing musicians were joined by several high school choirs, which sang a spiritual at the beginning and performed during intermission. The performance was introduced by Mayor Bill de Blasio and his wife Chirlaine McCray, followed by filmmaker Spike Lee who proudly proclaimed himself a product of the New York City Public School system and offered encouraging words to the eagerly awaiting crowd.
Given the circumstances, critics were specifically enjoined from reviewing the production. Let us say, simply, that the overall excellence of Aaron Sorkin’s stage adaptation of Harper Lee’s ground-breaking novel was very much in evidence, with nothing lost and quite a bit enhanced by the contribution from the very much engaged and involved audience.
That audience reaction, mind you, was altogether staggering. The high school and middle school students, drawn from all five boroughs, hung on every word (which was surprisingly audible, given arena acoustics). The racial components of the novel resonated to the rafters, to say the least. Playwright Sorkin, presumably, had to be electrified by the way nuances in his script—which might ordinarily receive silently knowing nods from a few hundred playgoers each night—were here picked up and cheered by thousands of rapt patrons. Time and again, you could feel the visceral impact of the performance.
All this was made possible by the Mockingbird producers (led by Scott Rudin and Barry Diller) and Madison Square Garden, with executive chairman James L. Dolan providing the house and related expenses rent-free. Dolan threw in 18,000 boxes of popcorn, too. As far as we can tell, this was the largest audience for a live theatrical production since Euripides was pulling them in at the 24,000-seat house at Ephesus back in the third century B.C.
Electrifying is the word, I suppose, that best describes this one-of-a-kind exhibition. Now that Broadway producers, Madison Square Garden, and the New York City Department of Education have demonstrated that this sort of civic partnership is not impossible once you substitute altruism for profits, one can only hope that other top-line hits do the same. Hamilton, notably, has performed a series of underwritten student matinees at its 1,300-seat home. But 18,000 public school students at one sitting, the majority of whom are unlikely to have ever seen live theater?
Mockingbird at Madison Square was phenomenal indeed, and likely as memorable for all in attendance—including the acting company and assorted witnesses from within the profession—as for the students.
To Kill a Mockingbird opened December 13, 2018, at the Shubert Theater, and played one performance on February 26, 2020 at Madison Square Garden. Tickets and information: tokillamockingbirdbroadway.com
