Behind the Curtain: “Driving Miss Daisy” author Alfred Uhry

We’re taking you Behind the Curtain today to learn a bit more about BCTCO’s first summer production, Driving Miss Daisy.

Daisy was written by American playwright and screenwriter Alfred Fox Uhry. Born in Atlanta, Georgia on December 3, 1936, Alfred graduated from Druid Hills High School in 1954 and then later earned his degree from Brown University.

Everyone starts somewhere, and Uhry’s early work revolved around the stage where he worked as a lyricist and librettist for a host of commercially unsuccessful musicals such as America’s Sweetheart about Al Capone and a revival of Little Johnny Jones starring Donny Osmond. Following a disastrous musical collaboration with American composer Robert Waldman (the show Here’s Where I Belong was closed after just one performance), the two found considerable success with The Robber Bridegroom. Robber Bridegroom was mounted on Broadway in 1975 and 1969, and it went on to enjoy a year-long national tour. The show also earned Uhry his first Tony nomination.

Driving Miss Daisy came later in 1987, and it was the first of what known as Uhry’s “Atlanta Trilogy” of plays, all set during the first half of the 20th century. The play was originally produced off-Broadway, and it earned him the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Uhry later adapted the script into the screeplay for the 1989 film starring Jessican Tandy and Morgan Freeman which was recognized with an Academy Award for adaptation.

The second of the trilogy is The Last Night of Ballyhoo, which received the Tony Award for Best Play in 1996. A 1998 musical called Parade rounded out the series, and the libretto for the show earned him a Tony Award for Best Book of a Musical.

Be sure to join us as we bring Uhry’s first part of the Atlanta Trilogy to life later this month. Driving Miss Daisy opens on Friday, July 30th at 8:00pm at Harmony Artistic Center, 3979 Parkway Lane in Hilliard, OH. Tickets for this fundraising event will be $12, and you’ll help Save the Circus with your ticket purchase. Please call 614-470-4895 for reservations or visit our website at www.bctco.org.

Behind the Curtain: Noël Coward

Sir Noël Peirce Coward was known by many titles throughout his lifetime – composer, director, actors, singer. He also held the title of playwright, and he happens to have penned BCTCO’s up-coming play, Hay Fever.

Coward was born in a suburb of London, and at the encouragement of his ambitious mother, he attended a dance academy in the city. He made his professional stage début at the age of eleven in 1911 as Prince Mussel in the children’s play The Goldfish. Coward described the experience in one volume of his three-part autobiography:

One day … a little advertisement appeared in the Daily Mirror…. It stated that a talented boy of attractive appearance was required by a Miss Lila Field to appear in her production of an all-children fairy play: The Goldfish. This seemed to dispose of all argument. I was a talented boy, God knows, and, when washed and smarmed down a bit, passably attractive. There appeared to be no earthly reason why Miss Lila Field shouldn’t jump at me, and we both believed that she would be a fool indeed to miss such a magnificent opportunity.

After The Goldfish, Coward’s young career seemed to take off swimmingly. He appeared across London in numerous productions from 1911 to 1915 – from Garrick Theatre in London’s West End to the Savoy Theatre and the London Coliseum.

Coward later began to sell short stories to magazines in order to help his family financially. Finances had always been difficult for the family as Arthur Coward, the father, lacked ambition and industry in his role as a piano salesman. Noël Coward also began writing and producing plays during this time, and his first solo effort as a playwright – The Rat Trap (1918) – was eventually produced in October 1926.

However, Coward struck gold with a show titled The Vortex in 1924. The show dealt with topics which were considered shocking in its day, and its notoriety and fiery performances attracted large audiences. It was the success of The Vortex in both London and America which caused a great demand for Coward to produce new plays.

In 1925, he premiered Hay Fever – a comedy about four egocentric members of an artistic family. The family casually invite acquaintances to their country house for a weekend, and they spend their time bemusing and enraging each other’s guests. Coward’s writing and characters must have given the audience what they came for became Hay Fever was the first of his plays to hold a long-lasting place in mainstream theatrical repertoire. By the 1970s, the play was recognized as a theatre classic, and The Times described it as a “dazzling achievement; like The Importance of Being Earnest, it is pure comedy with no mission but to delight, and it depends purely on the interplay of characters, not on elaborate comic machinery”.

BCTCO’s rendition of Hay Fever is set to open on June 4th and will run for two weekends. For show and ticket information, check out our website.