Vanessa Redgrave to Star in Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking on Broadway; Hare’s The Vertical Hour Will Play the Music Box

Vanessa Redgrave will return to Broadway next spring in The Year of Magical Thinking, a one-woman play by Joan Didion based on her autobiographical book of the same title, according to The New York Times.

The play, Didion’s first, is a loose adaptation of her book about her bereavement over the death of her husband of 39 years, John Gregory Dunne, in 2003 and the subsequent death of their daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne Michael, in 2005. Per the Times article, the Broadway production will be directed by David Hare, who is also famous as a playwright. (He directed Redgrave in the 1985 film Wetherby, which he wrote.) The Year of Magical Thinking will be produced by Scott Rudin and is slated to open on March 29 at the Booth Theater.

In related news contained in the Times article, Rudin will present Hare’s play The Vertical Hour on Broadway at the Music Box, with performances scheduled to begin in November 2006. Julianne Moore will star in the show under the direction of Sam Mendes. The play concerns Nadia Blye, a young American war correspondent turned academic who now teaches Political Studies at Yale. A brief holiday with her boyfriend in the Welsh borders brings her into contact with an Englishman whose culture and beliefs are a surprise and a challenge to her worldview and her relationship.