This was a “bio” performance that channeled Billie Holiday. It was set up like a nightclub in a theater with tables and waiters for drinks. The cast was really just one person, Audra McDonald as Billie, backed up with piano, bass and drums. Audra really captured Billie’s voice and style, and she went through the great classics. Along with the songs were stories from Billie’s life, as if she was telling the nightclub audience.
The playbill had this from the writer, Lanie Robertson:
In 1959, a boyfriend of mine saw the great Billie Holiday in a little dive in North Philadelphia about three months before she died. He said she stumbled in obviously “quite high,” carrying her little Chihuahua Pepi, whom she introduced to her audience. A water glass was kept well filled with booze atop the piano for her. She and a piano player performed ten or 12 of her songs for an audience of seven patrons. Then, he said, she staggered out.
That image of the world’s greatest jazz singer being so undervalued at the end of her life and career was an image that always haunted me.
Writing Lady Day at Emersons’s Bar & Grill was an attempt to rid myself of that ghost.
And this