Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill, a musical based on the life and songs of Billie Holiday, successfully transports the Lyric Stage audience to an early 1950s jazz club in Philadelphia. The stage is arranged simply, with a piano, microphone, and small table for Billie’s gin. Only Jimmy Parker (Chauncey Moore), Billie’s piano player and fiancé, join Lady Day on the stage.
Billie Holiday (Jacqui Parker) arrives at Emerson’s Bar and grill, the fictional jazz club setting of Lady Day with her face half-veiled in shadows. And then, the amber strobe light hits her face and illuminates her shimmery eye shadow and the black sequins on her cocktail dress. She stands, confident and statuesque, at the microphone in her pearl necklace and fur stole.
Though the surface of the club is constant and solid, the story, the emotional highs and lows, come solely from Lady Day.
And as her honey-coated voice cries out over the piano and fills the small theater, it is easy to picture yourself in a more intimate setting. This feeling is amplified as Billie begins to divulge the stories of her life between songs. She gracefully pours herself another gin and sits at one of the bar tables. She leans forward and welcomes the audience into her world. “I gotta sing the way I feel. I gotta roam around and find the song,” she says, relating how bars refused to pay her when she wouldn’t sing God Bless the Child after her mother’s death.
She shares painful memories with the ease of talking to an old friend. She tells of her days working in a brothel, with her head tilted and smiling at some distant memory. She talks about the Victrola there and learning to sing. She mixes stories of her grandmother’s death and her rape at age 10 in with smiles and stories of her mother.
Jimmy’s character works in the background. He plays a few bars on the piano to tear Billie away from her stories and remind her to sing. He sips his whiskey and occasionally mutters his agreement with Billie; he chuckles as she talks about her parole. He keeps her on track.
The endlessly repeating theme is Billie’s relationship with her mother “The Duchess.” The audience hears of her childhood, moving from place to place, of how her mother earned her nickname, of their days at the cat house, of her mother’s generosity. Here, Billie diverges. Her voice turns sour and pleading as she describes her rock bottom, when she was with her first love Sonny, and they were strung out on heroin and needed help and her mother refused.
“Sonny,” the Duchess used to say, “was blacker on the inside.”
“But he was just a scared little boy, innocent Sonny,” Billie pleads to the audience.
And when words no longer help her, Billie returns to song: “And that’s how it goes, when a woman loves a man.”
It seems that Billie is unable to leave the audience with a negative view of her mother, though. She pauses and nods to Jimmy and begins the much alluded to God Bless the Child. She dedicates the song to her mother, of course, “because I love her still, even if she is dead and told me ‘no.’” She sings with her eyes closed and her hands clasped to the microphone stand, her glass of gin resting on the table, and when the song ends, the lights die and her silhouette fades to blackness.
The pattern repeats as Billie describes her father’s death. The story ends, but Billie has more to express, and so, she starts to sing Somebody’s On My Mind.
These extremes, this wavering, demonstrate all the elements that keep Billie afloat: Jimmy, her music, and drugs. And the three are in a constant battle, it seems. After the stories of her mother and father, Billie starts to sway and tries to exit the stage.
“I need help,” she says to Jimmy. Jimmy encourages her to stay on stage with a few bars of the next song. And though Billie sings Easy Livin’ and her lighthearted demeanor returns, her smile is not as wide.
As the bad feelings return, though, she exits the stage, and returns with her shoulders hunched and her feet bare and clutching a dog, her face buried in its fur. Appropriately, she begins with the song Tain’t Nobody’s Biz-ness. With her slurring, drunken demeanor she sings, “Ain’t nobody’s business if I go to church on Sunday and cabaret all Monday.”
The musical ends with a final story: the story of Sonny putting the drugs in Billie’s suitcase, because no one would arrest a star, and Billie showing up to court in a limo and fur coat. In Deep Song, Billie croons, “Lonely grief is haunting me” as the music slowly drowns out her voice and her face returns to shadows.
runs from March 26th to April 24th, with evening performances Wednesday through Saturday and matinées on Saturdays and Sundays. Tickets are $25 to $54. Lyric Stage Company, 140 Clarendon Street, Boston, 617-585-5678.
Although I haven’t seen it done by the Lyric Stage Company, I wrote a very positive review for this play 12+ years ago when I caught it at Trinity Repertory Company in Providence, Rhode Island. I’m glad to see it’s still being produced and heartily encourage our readers to see it while it’s in Boston.
I humbly note that this is a rather unusual review; it describes the entire story in extreme detail (even including several quotations!) and yet never says a word about the performances or whether the show is worth seeing. (All right, it does say that the audience is “successfully” transported to Philadelphia. Alas, we all know what W.C. Fields said about that city. )
Most of us might benefit from hearing far less of the details of the show, and just a bit more about whether you actually liked what you saw.