‘Lady Day’: Audra McDonald as Billie Holiday

PORTRAIT OF THE JAZZ ICON: Audra McDonald in ‘Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill.’ Photo: Evgenia Eliseeva

LADY DAY AT EMERSON’S BAR & GRILL
By Lanie Robertson
Directed by Lonny Price
Circle in the Square Theatre
235 West 50th Street
(212-239-6200), http://ladydayonbroadway.com/

By Scott Harrah

It is difficult to think of the elegant, golden-voiced, five-time Tony winner Audra McDonald portraying the late tortured jazz singer Billie Holliday. After all, Ms. McDonald is best known for her soaring soprano voice, but interpreting Billie Holiday is tricky territory for any singer/actress because “Lady Day” herself was such a unique vocalist, with a tragic persona that was mythical, bigger than life and almost impossible to mimic.  Billie was a woman in agony, and one could sense and feel her sorrow with every plaintive note she sang, so recreating her soul in a musical dramatization is a tall order indeed.  Fortunately, Ms. McDonald never tries to be a Billie Holiday impersonator, and she displays, with heart-breaking veracity, the many dimensions of the groundbreaking jazz pioneer, from her booze and drug-addled body language and salty anecdotes told in a raspy speaking voice to her reedy song delivery and unique vocal phrasings that influenced not just jazz but music in general.

New Yorkers already know what a versatile musical-theater star Ms. McDonald is, but here she shows us that she’s also a richly complex actress with the ability to dig deep into Holiday’s mystique and make us understand the scale of the woman’s many afflictions, from substance abuse to troubles with the law and the discrimination and cruelty all African-American performers experienced in the pre Civil Rights days. Granted, on the surface Ms. McDonald is perhaps too glamorous for the role, but she captures, in various monologues and songs, every nuance of Billie, from her laconic mannerisms to tales of the personal abuse and oppression she suffered as a woman of color in the America of yesteryear, with very little education, an arsenal of talent and infamous inner demons.  Although Audra McDonald looks very little like Billie, even with the trademark gardenia in her hair, she gives us an illuminating portrait of one of the most important jazz artists ever.

This is the first Broadway mounting of Lanie Robertson’s 1986 Off-Broadway bio-play about Holiday, and it seems an odd vehicle for Ms. McDonald because this really cannot be classified as a play, musical or cabaret show, but is a hybrid of all these genres. Set in a small south Philadelphia bar circa 1959, shortly before the singer’s untimely death from cirrhosis and heart disease at age 44, Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill is 90 minutes of Ms. McDonald as Billie reflecting on her life, sharing anecdotes and singing all of the Holiday hits, from “I Wonder Where Love Has Gone” and “What a Little Moonlight Can Do” to “God Bless the Child,” “Strange Fruit” and “T’ain’t Nobody’s Business If I Do.”

The show is loosely based on an alleged, real-life account of Billie Holiday playing in a Philadelphia dive bar in 1959 for just seven people. She was high on drugs, swilling liquor and performing a dozen or so of her songs alongside her piano player Jimmy Powers (Shelton Becton), while holding her pet chihuahua Pepi (played here by “Roxie”) for just seven people before finally “staggering” out of the place.

Director Lonny Price gives Ms. McDonald free rein to channel Billie Holiday in all her train-wreck glory, but the performance always feels natural and authentic, and Mr. Robertson’s script always paints the legend in a dignified light and never stoops to the sensationalistic lows of such recent Broadway bio-drama musicals as End of the Rainbow, the tabloid-style show about the end of Judy Garland’s life.

Although this show sheds no new light on Billie Holiday, nonetheless we leave Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill with an appreciation for the jazz icon’s unsettling life and talent, and marvel at the truth, insight, authenticity and marvelous texture of Ms. McDonald’s performance, one of the most challenging and outstanding of her career.

LADY DAY & HER DOG: Ms. McDonald as Billie with chihuahua Pepi (Roxie). Photo: Evgenia Eliseeva

LADY SINGING THE BLUES: Audra McDonald as Billie Holiday, shortly before her death at age 44. Photo: Evgenia Eliseeva

Edited by Scott Harrah
Published April 20, 2014
Reviewed at press performance on April 19, 2014