Lady Day at the Emerson Bar & Grill
The astounding Jacqui Parker takes a sad song, and, as the Beatles’s lyric goes, makes it better. In cLady Day At Emerson’s Bar & Grill, Lanie Robertson’s bio tribute to Billie Holiday, Parker brings the great jazz vocalist to life as she meanders through a set at a club as if the songs were touchstones to what haunts her.
The songs you hope she’ll sing, she does, from the romantic "What A Little Moonlight Can Do," to the philosophical "God Bless The Child" and the protest against lynching "Strange Fruit." Each acts as a signpost on the rocky path Holiday (who was dubbed Lady Day) trod. She’s beautifully accompanied by pianist Chauncey Moore, appealing as Jimmy Powers, who looks out for Holiday on stage and back stage too.
Currently at the Lyric Stage, the soulful musical drama delivers the goods.
Lady Day’s pain goes way back
By age 16, Eleanor Fagan was overweight to the point of being nearly obese, a Precious of her times, the pounds perhaps the outward sign that she’d had suffered the sort of psychological and physical trauma that sends a black girl of her era, the Jazz Age, into the back ward of a county mental hospital. Instead she was destined for immortality.
She got a break, a chance request at a little Harlem club to sing. She’d picked a new name for herself after her favorite movie star Billie Dove, and as Billie Holiday she would sing her way into the annals of the jazz greats. But there was no fairy tale ending for the vocalist known as Lady Day. The men who came into her life were wastrels leading her to drug addiction, and virulent racism poisoned her career as the girl singer with important big bands touring the country.
At the end, denied a cabaret card permitting her to sing in New York clubs because she had a prison record, Holiday got a gig at a small eatery in Philly, which is where Lady Day takes place.
Director Spiro Veloudos gives us a production that’s always interesting to watch, no small feat since one of the two characters is stuck behind a piano for most of the time. He’s aided immeasurably by Parker who’s riveting in her anguish, most notably when her singing transports her away from an unkind world.
The satisfying musical arrangements come from Danny Holgate, who played Powers and arranged the songs for the show’s first production at New York’s Vineyard Theatre with Lonette McKee as Holiday; since then the show has since been staged world wide.
Set Designer Skip Curtiss has nicely approximated a gritty Philly club where in March 1959 Miss Holiday has been booked, not altogether a date to her liking. The lighting from Karen Perlow wonderfully accentuates the diva’s mood swings. Billie liked satin, which is how Mallory Frers dresses her, appropriately for the year in a clingy gown that harkens back to the popular films of the 1930s.
Billie Holiday had a hard way to go but Jacqui Parker makes it supremely easy for us to follow her.
As for Parker, she’s indelible. Not by impersonating Billie but by inhabiting her. Hers is a sister under the skin performance.
Lady Day At Emerson’s Bar & Grill featuring Jacqui Parker as Billie Holiday continues through April 24 at the Lyric Stage Company of Boston.
