110. LADY DAY
Outside the Little Shubert Theatre.
Whoever
needs a reminder of why Billie Holiday was one of the greatest jazz vocalists
of the last century should get on down to the Little Shubert Theatre on W. 42nd
Street where the outstanding Dee Dee Bridgewater is channeling the singer in LADY
DAY, a concert cum drama about the vocalist’s tragic life. Let’s get one thing
out of the way: the part of this show that can loosely be called a tribute
concert is terrific, and fans of Lady Day, as this major African-American
artist (who died at 44 in 1959) was popularly known, will be more than
satisfied by how well her singing has been captured by Ms. Bridgewater. Without the music, however, the
drama part is disposable. For this, one would need a play in which the music was secondary to the story, if that were possible, as was the case back in 1986 when Lonette McKee tackled LADY DAY AT EMERSON'S BAR AND GRILL, a work revived just this year in Chicago. That play included 15 songs; this one has 29.
Playwright Stephen Stahl (who also
directed) places the action of LADY DAY in 1954, when Holiday, completing an extensive
European tour, performed in London. His first act shows her arriving late for a
rehearsal with her band, represented by a marvelous four-piece ensemble composed of Sunny
(Bill Jolly), a pianist; Deon (James Cammack), a bassist; Kelavon (Jerome Jennings),
a drummer; and Elroy (Neil Johnson), a saxophonist, the only white man in the
group; the great black saxophonist Lester Young, who was so intimately involved
in Holiday’s career, is referred to but not represented.
The locale is the unadorned stage (designed by Beowulf Boritt), with its soaring brick walls and upstage loading dock, where the concert
is going to be performed; a ruggedly handsome assistant stage manager (Rafael
Poueriet)—briefly ogled by Holiday—goes about his tech business as the band members
banter among themselves and with Billie and her white road manager, Robert
(David Ayres), a pleasant-looking, blandly acted young man who worries over her troublesome
habits. Billie, after all, has a serious history of drug and alcohol addiction.
As she rehearses a string of songs from her popular repertory, she
suggests ways she wants to approach several of them (as if she hasn’t sung them
over and over with this band throughout the tour). When she’s alone, the devils of memory besiege
her and, spotlighted down left, she reenacts key moments of trauma in her life
as the bastard child of a troubled Philadelphia woman, including when she was raped by a
friend of her mother’s at age ten. Sometimes, like Tevya in FIDDLER ON THE ROOF, she talks to God. Ms. Bridgewater, although she doesn't vocalize the
other characters in her recollections, engages in dramatic confrontations with
them in the glare of harsh spotlighting (designed by Ryan O'Gara), as vivid video projections of images reflecting
the indignities faced by blacks in the pre-Civil Rights era rush by. Meanwhile,
since it’s pouring outside, the clichéd aura of impending doom is emphasized by
flashes of lightning seen through the open dock door.
Dee Dee Bridgewater. Photo: Carol Rosegg.
In act two, which is when the show truly comes alive, we're at the actual
concert. The stage is decorated with fancy upstage curtains, and a large flower
arrangement; all the musicians are in tuxes. Ms. Bridgewater has changed from
the simple red dress and pony-tail of the rehearsal to the glamour of the
classic Holiday look, her brown arms and shoulders (the 63-year-old Ms. Bridgewater’s are
notably toned) embraced by the warmth of white ermine; a white, sequined,
floor-length gown (the costumes are by Patricia A. Hibbert) enveloping her body; and her hair tied back and adorned with
a white gardenia. Now, instead of reliving her disastrous life in flashbacks,
Holiday gets drunk, strays from the script she’s supposed to be following, and in
the playwright’s conceit, exposes her private life to the English audience; this allows her to tie many of the songs together with her personal narrative, as in so many
biographical and autobiographical cabaret acts. What makes her ill-advised behavior
especially problematic is that she knows she has to keep her nose clean because
she needs to demonstrate to law enforcement back in New York that she deserves
to have her cabaret card restored to her; it was taken when she got was sent to prison on drug charges and without one no nightclub can hire her, regardless of her
stardom.
Dee Bridgewater. Photo: Carol Rosegg.
The scripted portions provide
interesting information for the uninitiated but are awkwardly written, artificially motivated, and,
often, distractingly intrusive; they are basically exposition in search of a play. Happily, Ms. Bridgewater is a damned good
actress and does a bang-up job of making her weak material sound believable. She plays Holiday’s direst moments without
any partners (including her rape) and shifts gears radically from one
emotional peak to another, all the while sliding instantaneously back to the
present to chat with her musicians or the audience, or to sing one sensational
number after the other. She plays Holiday with a sassy, fast-talking, no-nonsense attitude
that brings to mind the late Pearl Bailey, although I’m not sure how closely
this behavior matches the real Holiday’s personality; also, there’s a bit too
much self-congratulatory laughter whenever Holiday says something she thinks is
funny. Listening to rare interviews with her on YouTube reveals a more restrained
and subtle person, with a somewhat slurry speaking style that resembles the tone Ms.
Bridgewater very believably captures when Holiday gets drunk. This Holiday
occasionally speaks to the English audience using mild profanities (like “shit”)
that I doubt would have gone down well on a 1954 London stage, so I have to
assume playwright-director Stahl is taking liberties here.
The glory of this show, as I've indicated, is Dee Bridgewater, not only making silk out a sow’s ear script,
but incarnating the memorable Holiday singing style and vocal chops across an
enormous range of mostly terrific songs. Among the best known, of course, are “A
Foggy Day in London Town,” “All of Me,” “Lady Sings the Blues,” “Lover Man (Oh,
Where Can You Be?),” “Strange Fruit,” “My Man,” “God Bless the Child,” “Please
Don’t Talk About Me When I’m Gone,” “T’ain’t Nobody’s Bizness,” “Mean to Me,” “You’ve
Changed,” and so on. Some are sung without much ado, some are encased in an
anecdote, like the famous social protest song, “Strange Fruit.” Click on
YouTube and type in Billie Holiday and any of these or other songs and get
yourself in the mood for the next best thing to the real thing—Dee Dee
Bridgewater as Lady Day.
Regrettably, there were too many empty seats at the Saturday
matinee I attended; this show is far more deserving of an audience than a lot
of others out there. Despite its drawbacks, LADY DAY made my
day.