Vanessa Redgrave, James Earl Jones star in 'Driving Miss Daisy' on Broadway

10/25/2010 by Corinne Heller

Vanessa Redgrave and James Earl Jones are set to star in the Broadway premiere of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Driving Miss Daisy.

The production began previews on October 7 and is scheduled to open officially on Monday at the John Golden Theatre for a 16-week, limited engagement until Jan. 29, 2011.

The play, which was made into an Oscar-winning film in 1989, tells of Daisy Wethan, a widowed, 72-year-old Jewish woman living in Atlanta in the late 1940s. She hires Hoke Colburn, an African American man, as her chauffeur after she is deemed too old to drive and the two forge a bond that transcends social and racial boundaries that were apparent during the time.

"It's a celebration of this great talent in an intimate space," Playbill.com quoted director David Esbjornson as saying.

"You get up close and personal with these icons of theatre, and yet at the same time, we're adding some visual things," he said. "We are working with a little bit of projection. We have scenic elements that didn't exist in the Off-Broadway production, like a staircase, things like that. But it is fragments and those fragments break apart and come together and participate in the storytelling."

Redgrave, a 73-year-old British actress known for movies such as Howards End and Mission Impossible and who played Dr. Erica Noughton on the series Nip/Tuck, and Jones, a 79-year-old actor known for his booming voice and who voiced the original Darth Vader in the Star Wars films, are both Tony Award winners.

Morgan Freeman and Jessica Tandy starred in the film, which won four Academy Awards. Freeman also starred in the play off-Broadway when it ran between 1987 and 1990.

Get tickets to Driving Miss Daisy on Broadway at Telecharge.com.