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A CurtainUp Review
Driving Miss Daisy
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Miss Daisy is chauffeured into London
After entertaining New Yorkers for half a year, David Esbjornson’s production comes to London with its Broadway cast of three intact. You will find Elyse Sommer’s thorough review of this play in New York after my comments on the London transfer. I liked the gentleness of the writing and the humour of Alfred Uhry’s script but it was the performances of the men that charmed us here in London. James Earl Jones’ rich deep voice, his impeccable timing and the humanity of his character worked better than that of the cantankerous ex-schoolmarm. I liked too the naturalness of Boyd Gaines’ son Boolie trying to persuade his intransigent mother that she mustn’t drive any more after causing thousands of dollars worth of damage. The conspiracy between the men is fun as they both try to change her mind about having and using a chauffeur. What I found unconvincing was Daisy Werthan’s switch from accusatory employer standing like the Statue of Liberty, except she is standing for summary justice, with a pair of kitchen tongs aloft holding the supposedly stolen empty can of salmon. However Redgrave manages to replace her incriminating can graciously with a theatrical flourish when her false accusation is embarrassingly exposed. The salmon can incident is the best theatrical moment in the play. Maybe the passage of time would have been more convincing with a costume change for Redgrave over the quarter of a century from 1948 but she did stoop a bit more with her dowager’s hump gaining in prominence and seemed more hesitant and frail. The final scene with her lips stretched over her gum shielded teeth is not easy to watch. Overall the play didn’t speak to me the way history did when President Obama was elected, although I found the Martin Luther King newsreel footage and the anthem "We Shall Overcome" evocative. I think I might have preferred the pretty cars and the Southern scenery and atmosphere of the movie which I have yet to see. I am starting to get irritated by musical scene changes but the music for Miss Daisy seemed in keeping. Give me that other Alfred Uhry work Parade anyday! Yet, London theatregoers who don’t really "do" standing ovations – they used to be kept for a once in a lifetime performance – saw them for this audience pleasing play. Cast and credits and running time as oer tge New York review belowbelow Box Office: 0844 482 5120 Booking to 17th December 2011 Reviewed by Lizzie Loveridge based on 6th October 2011 performance at Wyndham’s, Charing Cross Road, London WC2H 0DA (Tube: Leicester Square) |
2010 Broadway Production Review by Elyse Sommer
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You're my best friend.— Miss Daisy to Hoke.
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Vanessa Redgrave and James Earl Jones
(Photo: Carol Rosegg) |
To answer the above in last to first order.
I spent three evenings this past week at theaters on 45th Street. The street's biggest crowds each night were at the Golden Theater's stage door so it seems that Redgrave and Jones do indeed seem to have the oomph factor producers nowadays consider a must for straight dramas. This was confirmed by the packed house on the night I saw the play and, if you still consider the nowadays de rigueur standing ovation a valid indicator, this Miss Daisy and Hoke have not only brought ticket selling magnetism to this revival but are fulfilling audience expectations.
Redgrave and Jones are indeed excellent and Boyd Gaines couldn't be better in the important intermediate role of Miss Daisy's son Boolie (Dan Ackroyd nabbed a best supporting actor Oscar nomination). If there's a star constellation in this production, however, it's Jones. Since he's 79 it's admittedly a stretch for him to play Hoke at 60, his age at the beginning of the play, but Jones is so endearing that this is never a real concern.
While Jones comes mighty close to stealing the show, Redgrave is not an actress to be overshadowed. As a member of the renowned British thespian family, she's a far remove from the Jewish Werthans of Atlanta, yet she's pro enough to speak her lines without a trace of her native Britspeak. It should also come as no surprise that she has put her own spin on Miss Daisy. She's more school-marmish and less elegant than Jessica Tandy was and this works pretty well. Ultimately though, especially during her interpretation of Miss Daisy's throat-tightening final scene, Redgrave's does Daisy at 97 so harrowingly that it seems too much of an actor-ish tour-de-force. Though this left me stunned but dry-eyed and somehow heightened my indelible memories of Jessica Tandy's more delicate performance, it should be noted that there were quite a few sobs to be heard all around me.
As to that first question about how the set-in-her ways Daisy Wertham can convincingly change from stubbornly rejecting the chauffeur her son insisted on hiring for her to cherishing him as her best friend, the credit here belongs to the playwright as much as the actors. The 90-minute arc that begins with Miss Daisy's resistance and Hoke's persistence and ends up with them convincingly bonded still works because Uhry has avoided melodrama and focused on real and believable characters — understandably so, since Daisy and Hoke are sensitively crafted portraits drawn from real people from his own Atlanta childhood. Miss Daisy is a composite of various kinfolk, including his grandmother, whose chauffeur actually was a man named Will Coleburn who lived long enough to see the original production.
The two protagonists are as different as can be, yet as we watch them it becomes clear that underneath it all, they very much alike. They're different in that Miss Daisy is a white well-to-do Southerner whose parsimonious ways are the product of a less affluent youth, and though she regards herself tolerant, harbors many prejudices typical of her era and cultural background. Hoke is an uneducated black man who may sound subservient but he too is proud and strong-willed and he has more than a few lessons in tolerance for his boss: the first time, when she's convinced he's followed what she views as his race's pattern of easy thievery by stealing a can of salmon from her carefully inventoried pantry, and when during a trip to visit her brother in Mobile, Alabama, she is totally insensitive to his not having been able to go to the bathroom at a gas station and he stands up to her. Adding to the believability of this unlikely friendship is the fact that Uhry keeps a tight reign on any saccarine impulses. Hoke never drops the "Miss" and she never abandons her acerbic comments, especially about her son's probably paying Hoke too well.
The finely drawn portraits are the stuff of what was once common theatrical fare but is nowadays regarded as a rarity: the well-made play, without fourth wall breaking explanatory narration, just a gentle, fairly predictable story that engages us through the interaction of its universally appealing characters. Since the story parallels the Civil Rights movements, this moving personal drama has a historical subtext that underscores these characters' universality.
The historical subtext is at its most incisive when one of the places to which Hoke drives miss Daisy every week, the reformed temple of which she is a member, is bombed. The bombing of that temple (The Hebrew Benevolent Association) in 1958, was one of the most traumatic events in Atlanta Jewish History and it opens Miss Daisy's eyes to the realities of bigotry that Hoke has known all too well all his life. When she declares that the racists who bombed her reformed temple probably had meant to bomb one of the conservative synagogues or the orthodox one, Hoke wryly remarks that "It doan' matter to them people. A Jew is a Jew to them folks. Jes like light or dark. We all the same nigger." (Uhry dramatized an earlier trauma for Atlantans, the Leo Frank’s trial, for the musical Parade (my review). The complexity of the era for liberal-minded Jews like the Werthans is actually most effectively seen via Booley's response to a Martin Luther King dinner invitation.
For anyone who saw the movie, which started with the crash and crunch of Miss Daisy's wrecking her car and generally opened up the play's episodic structure and expanded the 3-member cast, seeing David Esbjornson's more quiet, minimalist production will bring a new appreciation of the delicacy and richness of the basic play. So much so that it can begin more quietly with Boyd Gaines readying his mother's house for sale and us for a flashback. No need for a parade of real cars, or lots of interior and exterior scenery or costume changes for Miss Daisy. Just good actors to draw out the nuances of a changing personal relationship within the context of a changing society.
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Driving Miss Daisy Playwright: Alfred Uhry Director: David Esbjornson. Cast: James Earl Jones (Hoke Colburn), Vanessa Redgrave (Daisy Werthan) and Boyd Gaines (Boolie Werthan) Scenic design: John Lee Beattie Costumes: Jane Greenwood Lighting: Peter Kaczorowski Projections: Wendall K. Harrington Music: Mark Bennett Sound: Christopher Cronin Stage Manager: Karen Armstrong Running Time: 90 minutes without an intermission Golden Theatre 252 West 45th Street 212/239-6200 From 10/07/10; opening 10/25/10; closing 1/29/11. Monday @ 8pm, Tuesday @ 7pm, Wednesday - Saturday @ 8pm, Wednesday & Saturday @ 2pm Ticket Price: $66.50 - $126.50 Reviewed by Elyse Sommer at 10/21/10 press preview |
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In the Heights
