Review: Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill


Audra McDonald in Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill
(©Evgenia Eliseeva)

Audra McDonald doesn’t look or sound anything like Billie Holiday. So it’s a credit to the five-time Tony Award winner that she perfectly embodies the jazz singer legend in Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill, Lanie Robertson’s musical drama receiving its Broadway premiere. This gifted performer delivers such a chameleon-like vocal turn that if you shut your eyes it’s all too easy to believe you’re listening to the real thing.

Previously seen here in a 1986 Off-Broadway production starring Lonette McKee, the show depicts a late-night set performed by Holiday and a jazz trio in a small Philadelphia bar just four months before her death in 1959 at the age of 44. In between performing some fifteen songs, the clearly booze and drug-addled singer delivers a running biographical commentary about her tragedy-filled life.

For director Lonny Price’s atmospheric staging the Circle in the Square has effectively been partially converted to a cabaret, with a small stage at one end of the playing area which is otherwise filled with small tables inhabited by lucky (and free-spending) audience members. The result is an uncommon intimacy, with McDonald frequently wandering into the crowd begging cigarettes, chatting up patrons and one point literally falling into someone’s lap.

The rambling monologue accentuates Holiday’s bitterness and dissipation. Complaining about having to perform such trademark songs as “Strange Fruit” and “all that damn shit,” she angrily snaps down her accompanist Jimmy Powers’ (Shelton Becton) piano lid when he launches into the opening notes of “God Bless the Child.” She describes past lovers and her bitterness over having lost her cabaret license after she was arrested for drugs. Stopping the show to wander over to the bar opposite the stage, she pours herself a tall glass of vodka and later departs for several minutes while her band plays on, only to return holding a small Chihuahua in her arms. (The canine, played by a rescue dog named Roxie, is a real crowd pleaser).

Although the script does a reasonably good job of conveying Holiday’s tragic essence at this late point in her life, it’s not fully satisfying on dramatic terms. But it does serve as an efficient vehicle for McDonald’s uncanny impersonation of her sweetly husky vocal style. Perfectly capturing the singer’s slurry, jazzy intonations while wringing maximum emotion from such songs as “What a Little Moonlight Can Do,” “Foolin’ Myself” and “Crazy He Calls Me,” McDonald delivers an unforgettable tour-de-force turn.

By this point, more people have probably seen theatrical facsimiles of Billie Holiday—Dee Dee Bridgewater recently played the singer in another, short-lived Off-Broadway show--than ever saw her perform live. It’s an irony that even Lady Day herself might have appreciated.

Circle in the Square, 1633 Broadway. 212-239-6200. www.Telecharge.com.