TT: A perfect night on Broadway

Due to heightened national interest in the Broadway premiere of Driving Miss Daisy, The Wall Street Journal asked me to write a special review that would run not in the Greater New York section but on the paper’s national arts page. The show opened last night and the review is in this morning’s Journal. My editors called it–the production is remarkable. Here’s an excerpt.
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Everybody I know who saw the 1987 Off-Broadway production of Alfred Uhry’s “Driving Miss Daisy” remembers it with awe and affection, and agrees that the cast–Morgan Freeman, Dana Ivey and Ray Gill–couldn’t be bettered. If you’re one of those lucky folk, I suggest that you head straight for Broadway, where James Earl Jones, Vanessa Redgrave and Boyd Gaines are proving that when it comes to great acting, nobody ever has the last word. Alas, I saw Mr. Freeman only in the 1989 film version of “Driving Miss Daisy,” in which he was wonderful. Mr. Jones, however, has put a wholly personal spin on the part, and he’s giving a performance that is going to be talked about for the rest of his life–and after….
Where Mr. Freeman endowed Hoke with his own characteristic slyness, Mr. Jones opts instead to play him as a plain, blunt countryman whose sense of humor (if you can call it that) amounts to saying exactly what he thinks. I suspect that this approach is rather more realistic than that of Mr. Freeman, who in the film occasionally struck me as the least little bit too urbane to be true, and its effect is doubled and redoubled by Mr. Jones’ foghorn voice and mammoth physical presence. If you want to know what star quality means, this is it.
During the first part of the play, I wondered whether Ms. Redgrave, who plays Daisy in a fairly low key, was going to get upstaged in a big way by Mr. Jones. Before long, though, I figured out that what I was seeing was in fact a smart decision by a seasoned pro. The only way to “compete” against a performance as dynamic as the one being given by Mr. Jones is to come at it from a different angle, and by underplaying the idiosyncrasies of the combative, querulous Daisy, Ms. Redgrave slips out from under his long shadow and makes an equally deep and persuasive impression….
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Read the whole thing here.
The theatrical trailer for the 1989 film of Driving Miss Daisy: