To Kill a Mockingbird will bow on Broadway in 2017/2018

Producer Scott Rudin has announced that a new stage adaptation of Harper Lee's classic novel To Kill a Mockingbird, written by Academy Award winner Aaron Sorkin, will land on Broadway during the 2017-2018 season.

The production will be directed by Tony winner Bartlett Sher, who is currently represented on the Great White Way by the revivals of The King and I at LCT's Vivian Beaumont Theatre and Fiddler on the Roof at Broadway Theatre.

Synopsis: "Based on an event that occurred near her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama in the 1930s, Harper Lee's story of racial injustice and the destruction of childhood innocence centers on small-town lawyer and single father Atticus Finch (modeled after Lee's father, attorney Amasa Lee), his young daughter Scout, her older brother Jem, and their mysterious neighbor, the reclusive Arthur 'Boo' Radley. Written during the early stages of the Civil Rights Movement - at a time when Jim Crow laws were still in effect in many Southern states - Lee's novel held a mirror to the culture of racism of the Deep South."

Exact dates, venue, casting and creative team information will be announced at a later date.

Harper Lee's debut novel To Kill a Mockingbird was published in 1960 and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. It has gone on to sell over 50 million copies in print to date and has been published in over 40 different languages.

A recent stage adaptation by Christopher Sergel under the direction of Timothy Sheader played London's Open Air Theatre in Regent's Park in Summer 2013. The same production returned to the venue in late Summer 2014 and also played a Summer 2015 engagement at London's Barbican Theatre.