Wednesday, June 30, 2010

ENTERTAINMENT NEWS … DRIVING MISS DAISY

ENTERTAINMENT NEWS …

DRIVING MISS DAISY

DRIVING MISS DAISY

Producers Jed Bernstein and Adam Zotovich announced today that Tony Award-winners James Earl Jones and Vanessa Redgrave will return to the New York stage this Fall to star opposite one another in the Broadway Premiere of Alfred Uhry‘s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Driving Miss Daisy. Directed by David Esbjornson (The Goat, Or Who Is Sylvia?), Driving Miss Daisy will begin performances on October 7, 2010, at the John Golden Theatre (252 West 45th Street), with an official opening on Monday, October 25, 2010.

Both icons of the stage, Ms. Redgrave has enjoyed an extraordinary career that includes her Tony Award-winning performance in Long Day's Journey Into Night, and her memorable last Broadway appearance in Joan Didion‘s The Year of Magical Thinking, for which she was also nominated for the Tony Award; Mr. Jones made his Broadway debut in the Tony Award-winning play, Sunrise at Campobello in 1958, and Driving Miss Daisy caps a career that includes his starring roles in the original Broadway production of Fences, for which he won the Tony Award, and his Tony-winning (and Oscar nominated) performance in The Great White Hope.

In addition to the Pulitzer Prize, Mr. Uhry received the Academy Award for his screenplay of Driving Miss Daisy, and is the recipient of two Tony Awards - for his play The Last Night of Ballyhoo (Best Play 1997), and his book for the musical Parade (1998).

From its landmark Off-Broadway production in 1987 to the remarkable success of the Oscar-winning film version (4 Academy Awards, including Best Picture), Driving Miss Daisy has become one of the most beloved American stories of the late twentieth century.

Mr. Uhry‘s classic play is a timeless, searing, funny, and ultimately hopeful meditation on race relations in America, told through the complex relationship between two of popular culture‘s most enduring characters. When Daisy Werthan, a widowed, 72-year-old Jewish woman living in midcentury Atlanta, is deemed too old to drive, her son hires Hoke Colburn, an African American man, to serve as her chauffeur. What begins as a troubled and hostile pairing, soon blossoms into a profound, life-altering friendship that transcends all the societal boundaries placed between them.

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