He’ll defend anyone in court but knows that taking on Tom Robinson (played by Yaegel T. In the key role of Atticus Finch, the high-moral lawyer who is the clear star of this version of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” Richard Thomas imbues Finch with not just a passion for his work and a love of his family but a moody, sarcastic sense of humor. There are Black townsfolk sitting together in the courtroom, appalled and afraid. There’s a lynch mob large enough to feel frightening, though almost none of the Klansmen speak. One brilliant move of Sher’s is to create groups of observers whose very presence is a deep commentary on the action. Some of the uses of the large supporting cast are reminiscent of how Sher used crowds in his Lincoln Center productions of “Fiddler on the Roof” and “My Fair Lady,” not as extras or filler but as a way to underscore senses of community or calamity or whole shifts in the collective consciousness. The young girl named Scout - still a leading character in the play but no longer the center of attention she is in the novel - prowls the stage in the play’s opening seconds silently like Hamlet about to break into a soliloquy, yet it turns out she’s mainly there as a narrator, sharing those duties with her brother Jem and their goofy pal Dill. Sorkin’s take on “Mockingbird” begins on a bare stage, but a bare stage that’s been carefully designed to look like a theater that’s already pretty worn in by the time in which the play is set (1934).

The production openly invites comparisons to flashy melodramas of bygone days. But this version is also one heck of an old-fashioned melodrama, a legal drama wrapped in a sweet play about family and community with an overarching air of menacing evil. “Harper Lee’s ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’” earns such reactions partly because it is a story so many people have studied in school, discussed at length and been deeply affected by. Crowd reactions are grand with gasps of shock, rolls of laughter, growls of indignation and ovations that stop the show cold. The Bushnell audience is just as amped up as they get for “Hamilton” or “The Lion King” there. Judging from Tuesday’s crowd on the opening night of the Hartford stop at The Bushnell, where it plays through Sunday, the play is as popular and crowd-pleasing as ever. One of the most popular non-musical Broadway shows of recent years, the Aaron Sorkin stage version of “Harper Lee’s ‘To Kill a Mockingbird,’” has finally hit Hartford, 16 months after its first national tour began and 18 months since its Broadway production ended a long run that was severely compromised by the COVID pandemic.

To kill a mockingbird end