Review Roundup: LADY DAY AT EMERSON'S BAR & GRILL, Starring Audra McDonald, Opens in the West End

Audra McDonald, the Tony, Grammy, and Emmy Award-winning singer and actress, has made her long-awaited West End debut as jazz legend Billie Holiday in Lady Day at Emerson's Bar & Grill.

This critically acclaimed production, which broke box office records at the Circle in the Square in New York, is now running at Wyndham's Theatre in a limited engagement to Saturday 9 September. Book tickets here from £16.

1959, in a small, intimate bar in Philadelphia, Holiday puts on a show that, unbeknownst to the audience, will leave them witnesses to one of the last performances of her lifetime. Through her poignant voice and moving songs, one of the greatest jazz singers of all-time shares her loves and her losses.

Written by Lanie Robertson and directed by Lonny Price, Lady Day at Emerson's Bar & Grill recounts Holiday's life story through the songs that made her famous, including "God Bless the Child," "What a Little Moonlight Can Do," "Strange Fruit" and "Taint Nobody's Biz-ness."

Let's see what the critics had to say!

Photo credit: Marc Brenner

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Marianka Swain, BroadwayWorld: One American great inhabits another in this superior cabaret, as the Broadway legend Audra McDonald slips into the skin - and unforgettable voice - of jazz icon Billie Holiday. The emotional sensitivity makes it far more than just an immensely skilful impersonation, and makes McDonald's delayed West End debut well worth the wait.

Matt Wolf, The Arts Desk: Broadway so frequently fetes its visiting Brits that it's nice when the honour is repaid. That said, it's difficult to imagine audiences anywhere remaining unmoved by Audra McDonald's occupancy - "performance" seems too mundane a word - of the wrecked glory that was Billie Holiday toward the last months of her life in the Lanie Robertson musical play, Lady Day at Emerson's Bar and Grill.

Michael Billington, The Guardian: One legend gets to play another in this musical play: Audra McDonald, a six-time Tony award winner, appears as the great Billie Holiday. But while it is good to see McDonald, reprising her 2014 Broadway performance, on a London stage, I find something unbearably painful about the way Lanie Robertson's play dwells obsessively on the sad spectacle of its subject's final humiliation.

Dominic Cavendish, The Telegraph: Lanie Robertson's "musical play" - first seen in 1986 - doesn't give us the tear-jerking spectacle of a spent force, even though it's set four months before her death in July 1959. Instead, it embellishes a real-life event of unmistakable pathos: the night Holiday, hard-up and out of favour (prohibited from playing New York), pitched up in a dive in Philadelphia - the city of her birth - to perform to a paltry crowd.

Natasha Tripney, The Stage: As she sloshes back tumblers of gin, these autobiographical interludes become increasingly incoherent. She stumbles about the stage, slurs her speech, and loses track of the song she is supposed to be singing. McDonald's unravelling, her confusion and aggression, is played with commitment and passion but there's an acute absence of pathos - it's far too grand a collapse. Even the inclusion of a cute dog can't stop it from feeling a little voyeuristic.

Selena Begum, The Upcoming: Holiday is portrayed as a larger than life woman who was both tough and vulnerable, and who used music as a way to survive. The untarnished conversation is boldly contrasted with the sweet musical numbers. A rotating silver disco ball and blue lights accompany What a Little Moonlight Can Do, creating glimmers all around. Stopping midway in some tracks, McDonald brilliantly conveys the melancholia of Holiday's life, but also the good times, like her tour with renowned clarinet player Artie Shaw.

Ann Teneman, The Times of London: Lanie Robertson wrote this astonishing play after a boyfriend told him that he had seen Billie Holiday in 1959 in "a little dive" in north Philadelphia. Holiday stumbled in "quite high", carrying her chihuahua and a glass full of booze. She and her piano player performed a dozen or so songs for an audience of seven people before staggering back out.

Daisy Bowie-Sell, WhatsOnStage: The most remarkable moment of the play comes when McDonald sings Holiday's cold, harsh protest song "Strange Fruit". After telling a horrendous but surprisingly hilarious story of racism she experienced while on tour, she launches into the piece and it is so heart-wrenching and so despairing. This is not an easy night, but Holiday was not an easy woman and she definitely didn't have an easy life. But her talent was a gift and McDonald brings that to life beautifully here onstage, while also reminding us of some of the awful costs of fame.

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