The Mockingbird review

One show in the file kept two pages instead of one. A booking page named to-kill-a-mockingbird announced the Montana Repertory Theatre's stage adaptation for Tuesday, April 7, 2009, and a second page, mockingbird-review, ran a full write-up under the headline "MOCKINGBIRD MAKES A KILLING ON VRCFA STAGE." Most shows in this file survive as a single dispatch, booked and gone. This is the rare one with a verdict attached.

What the dispatch presented

The booking page did what every show page did: a date, a pitch, a quote from Harper Lee's novel about why it is a sin to kill a mockingbird, and a line crediting the Montana Repertory Theatre, in residence at the University of Montana and touring professionally since 1967. It also named the production's engine, a catalyst for the Big Read Scioto County, a countywide reading program the show was built to serve.

What the record kept

The review survives in full, not a clipping or a pull quote but the whole piece: the playwright credit (Christopher Sergel's stage adaptation), a verdict on pacing, and five named performers, Marie Fahlgren as Scout, Jennifer Fleming-Lovely as Jem, Heather Schmidt as Dill, Mikel McDonald as Atticus Finch, and Kathleen Conry as Maudie Atkinson. The booking page kept its own second verdict too, a line from Peter Strescino of The Chieftain in Pueblo, Colorado, calling the production "powerful and gripping" from its opening to its closing standing ovation.

What the review was for

A review did work a booking page could not: it told the town, after the fact, whether the season's gamble had paid off. The file otherwise runs on promises, dates and pitches written before anyone had seen the show. One page that answers back, written the week of the performance, is the closest this archive gets to an audience's own account.

The cast as evidence

The review names a cast built mostly of University of Montana students supporting two adult leads, and it does not treat that as a weakness. It singles out Heather Schmidt's Dill, noting the character was modeled on Truman Capote, a childhood friend of Harper Lee's, and praises Kathleen Conry's Maudie Atkinson as the play's narrative voice. Naming five performers by name is unusual generosity in a file that mostly tracks acts, not actors.

The county behind the booking

The Big Read Scioto County line is easy to miss on a show page, but it recasts the booking. This was not only a touring play slotted into a season, it was timed to a reading program, which means the presenter was coordinating with schools and the library system, not just filling a Tuesday night. The review never mentions the Big Read directly, but the booking page's credit line is the proof the coordination happened.

The review in this file

The two pages are filed together because they are the same event read before and after. The booking page sold a ticket; the review, printed the same week, told the reader whether the ticket had been worth it. Most of the file's shows only get the first half of that pair, a pitch with no printed answer, which is what makes this one worth keeping on its own.

Reading them together also dates the presenter's ambition. A touring adaptation of a canonical American novel, routed through a university repertory company and tied to a county reading program, was a bigger production than most Tuesday nights in this file carried. The review's detail, five names, a playwright credit, a line on pacing, reads like a paper taking the night seriously because the presenter had made the case that it deserved to be taken seriously.

The review is also the file's clearest answer to a question the other show pages cannot settle: whether the bookings were any good. A season of announcements can only promise; one surviving verdict, specific enough to name the cast, is the record's nearest thing to proof.

What is not shown

Whether the house was full that Tuesday, what the matinee audience made of the production, or how the Big Read program used the night afterward. The file keeps the booking and the verdict; the box office and the classrooms are outside the record.