Boyd Gaines Will Join James Earl Jones and Angela Lansbury for Driving Miss Daisy in Australia

By Andrew Gans
12 Oct 2012

Boyd Gaines in Driving Miss Daisy
Boyd Gaines in Driving Miss Daisy
Photo by Carol Rosegg

As previously reported, veteran actors James Earl Jones and Angela Lansbury, who recently shared the stage in the Broadway revival of Gore Vidal's The Best Man, will re-team for the Australian debut of Driving Miss Daisy.

Alfred Uhry's Pulitzer Prize-winning play will play Brisbane's Playhouse Theatre at Queensland Performing Arts Center beginning Feb. 5, 2013. Opening night is Feb. 9. David Esbjornson directs.

According to the show's official website, Tony winner Boyd Gaines, who is currently on Broadway in the revival of Enemy Of The People, will star as Boolie Werthan, a role he also played in the play's 2010 Broadway revival.

Jones starred opposite Vanessa Redgrave in the aforementioned Broadway production of Daisy. Directed by Esbjornson, Driving Miss Daisy opened on Broadway at the Golden Oct. 25, 2010, where it continued through April 9, 2011.

From its Off-Broadway production in 1987 to the success of the Oscar-winning film version (four Academy Awards, including Best Picture), Driving Miss Daisy, according to previous production notes, "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."

The play concerns Daisy Werthan, "a widowed, 72-year-old Jewish woman living in midcentury Atlanta, [who] is deemed too old to drive, [and] 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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