The Pocket Theatre will come back to life this summer when Atticus Finch takes the stage in August.
Directed by Mary Hill, "To Kill a Mockingbird," will be the theatre's first performance of the season, which will also include "Murder on the Orient Express" and "Elf: The Musical."
"Basically it's based on Harper Lee's Pulitzer Prize winner 'To Kill a Mockingbird.' Everybody in the world has had to read it through school ... and the play is very close to it. It's kind of almost making a little slice of life in 1935 Alabama. The prejudices and the fears, but softened through the eyes of an 8 year old, Scout the little girl, so it makes it almost poetic and soft, but it's really rather harsh," Hill said.
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James Kendall, former president of the theatre's board, said the play was scheduled to be their next play when the pandemic closed the theatre.
"We originally had this on our calendar for 2020. It was our second show on our lineup in 2020. We were actually a week out from putting the show on when the pandemic hit and the shutdown began," he said, noting they are using the sets they built back then.
"We decided to go ahead with this as our first show of 2021 just to minimize the spinning up of a new show," he said.
In the spring of 2019, Hill pitched the idea of doing the play. "It was one of her favorites so she brought it to us and we loved the show, loved the story and thought it would be a great one for the 2021 season," Kendall said.
"It's the depth of the play. I mean it doesn't just hit on racial issues. It covers things like mental illness, drug addiction, violence, mob violence, murder, these all take place in the play, and of course serious prejudice," Hill said.
Hill said most of the cast picked in 2020 were able to return, but "we had some people move away, some people get married. We only had to replace three cast members." The cast includes several children, and Hill said that all of them were able to return "about six inches taller, but they look great."
The cast is excited to be back, she said. "They're very up for it, very much so. They all came in just in high spirits."
Kendall said they believe the play will be a hit.
"We anticipate that "Mockingbird" will be a really good revenue generating show for us because of the popularity of the book and the popularity of the movie, and this show was actually on Broadway, so that has brought a lot of attention the last couple of years to the story because of the success it's had," he said, noting it is not the same version of the play that was recently on Broadway, but an earlier version.
While they stopped putting on plays during the pandemic, Pocket Theatre found several ways to keep entertaining the public over the last year.
"We started with a readers theatre. We had an idea to do a reading of 'Charlotte's Web,' so we recruited actors and each actor took a chapter of the book... and tried to add a little creativity to it, but they filmed themselves reading the chapter, so that was our initial kickoff," Kendall said, noting the effort was "somewhat successful, we got a lot of really good feedback from the community on it."
Tami Kendall, current president of the theatre's board, said it took effort to keep the building in shape over the pandemic.
"We're a community here and we're like family so when you're separated for a long period of time, we tried to do all our meetings virtually," she said.
"And we are a nonprofit, so trying to keep the building free of pests and windows that were broken, and air conditioner units and things like that, we still had our monthly bills but with no income, so we've just kind of been struggling to try and figure out ways to get more donations, to let people know we are still here," she said.
"We just kind of maintained. We turned everything off and then came back a couple of weeks later and had grey mold downstairs where all our costumes and props were, so we've had a lot of building issues that we've had to dealt with," Tami Kendall said, adding, "you reach a point where you feel bad asking for donations when you know people are out of work and things aren't as secure as they were before."
James Kendall said the pandemic broke the theatre's momentum.
"We're a community theatre in Hot Springs that's been around for 25 years, and still a large portion of Hot Springs doesn't know we're here, so we had a lot of momentum going in 2019, doing shows like 'Chicago,' our most successful show, so we were building a lot of momentum within the community with the productions we were doing on stage," he said.
"And so when the pandemic hit, we lost all that momentum, so we really want to try to find a way to stay relevant in the community even though we couldn't get together," he said.
