Review: Billie Holiday's Legend Comes to Life in Soulful LADY DAY AT Emerson's Bar and Grill

"No two people on earth are alike, and it's got to be that way in music or it ain't music." spoke jazz singer Billie Holiday. No singer duplicated Billie Holiday's inimitable voice or immortalized jazz singing and standards quite like this legendary diva.. While Holiday herself idolized Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong, "Lady Day" as she was nicknamed, captured the audience's imagination while breaking their hearts when speaking of her tragic childhood. Unfortunately, the singer's personal demons in love and life were also legendary. In a tribute to Holiday's career, Milwaukee Rep's opening Stackner Cabaret Lady Day at Emerson's Bar and Grill features the award-winning Alexis J. Roston portraying the star in her declining years after release from imprisonment on drug related charges, which plagued the star as long as she lived.

Roston, accompanied by Music Director Abdul Hamid Royal on piano, comprise Lannie Robertson's production directed by Leda Hoffmann. Holiday relates her sorrowful story and tales through her own retelling interspersed between classic jazz tunes. Roston speaks candidly for Holiday in a low, lustful voice regarding going to work at six, dropping out of school, following her mother when she worked in a brothel, and eventually surviving to become a young recording star. Using a measured tempo allowing the story and song to flow simultaneously, Hoffman paces the production while the audience continually anticipates Holiday's music, wishing for more.

Costume Designer Jason Orlenko dresses Roston in a luminous white floor length gown while she singes in a Philadelphia bar during the last year's of Holiday's short life--A time when she endured countless racial injustices in the recording and performing industry, which included walking through kitchens and back doors when a headlining singer worked in "White Only" clubs. To survive this inhumane treatment that spanned her lifetime could drive anyone to drinking and drugs, or in and out of bad marriage, which Holiday endured with her first husband Sonny.

These tragedies coursed through Holiday's performances and voice, and Rosen amplifies the singer's sorrow and triumphs with her own personal spirit on stage for compelling entertainment. Holiday's tribute to a black lynching, "Strange Fruit" aches in the hearts of any audience as does her signature "God Bless the Child." Rosen sings musical and poetic justice to both numbers, also winning the audience with a standing ovation for her performance on opening night.

On happier note, for example, "What a Little Moonlight Can Do" and "When a Man Loves A Woman," speak to Holiday's unfulfilled desires when she said, "All I ever wanted was a beautiful home, some kids and to cook"- dream almost anyone might relate to. A goal denied the songstress legend even though she inspired numerous jazz and pop musicians in the future while her voice reigned unique.

Holiday gave "Body and Soul" (a deeply felt love song that might have been included in this tribute) to her career, even as she struggled with heroin addiction. For one extraordinary woman of color to sell out Carnegie Hall twice, and then die in poverty as she lived in her youth, Lady Day spoke a sad truth when she surmised, "A kiss that is never tasted, is forever and ever wasted,"

Milwaukee only wonders throughout this soulful and superb Lady Day Stackner Cabaret, why Holiday was unable to discover that "kiss never tasted." Despite this loss of love through her life, Holiday's music and voice were never wasted. She forever lives on in the kisses for accolades and recordings from her admirers spanning almost a century. Eventually after Holiday died, she finally received the great love she so desperately deserved and hoped for, too late to save Holiday from her addictions. This fall, love Holiday once again at the Stackner Cabaret and remember there was undeniably no other music sung with a voice like hers.

Milwaukee Rep presents Lady Day at Emerson's Bar and Grill in the Stackner Cabaret at the Patty and Jay Baker Theater complex through October 30. For further information, performance schedule or tickets, please call: 414.224.9490 or www.milwaukeerep.com.