LADY DAY AT EMERSON'S BAR & GRILL Equity Principal Actors - Ivoryton Playhouse Foundation, Inc. Auditions

LADY DAY AT EMERSON'S BAR & GRILL - NYC EPA

Ivoryton Playhouse Foundation, Inc. | Ivoryton, CT

AUDITION DATE

LOCATION

• Date: Wednesday, January 28, 2026
• Location: Pearl Studios (500), 500 8th Ave, New York, NY 10018-6504
• Time: 10:00 AM – 6:00 PM (E)
• Lunch: 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM
• Holding room: Studio 303

CONTRACT

PERSONNEL

• SPT Executive Director: Jacqueline Hubbard
• $784 weekly minimum (SPT 8)
• Executive Producer: Ben Hope
• Managing Director: Krista May

SEEKING

Equity actors for roles in LADY DAY AT EMERSON'S BAR & GRILL (see breakdown). Director: Todd L. Underwood.

Ivoryton Playhouse is an Equal Opportunity Employer. The Ivoryton Playhouse aims to ensure that our productions and production teams reflect a multi-racial society that includes actors and stage managers with disabilities. Our casting process includes a flexible, inclusive policy to increase employment for actors and stage managers of color, women, seniors, and actors and stage managers with disabilities. We encourage actors of all races, ethnicities, gender identities, and abilities to audition. Ivoryton Playhouse is committed to diversity and encourages actors from underrepresented communities to apply. EPA Procedures are in effect for this audition. An Equity Monitor will be provided.

OTHER DATES

• First Rehearsal – April 21, 2026
• First Preview – May 7, 2026
• Opening – May 8, 2026
• Closing – May 31, 2026

Performance Schedule: Wednesdays 2:00 PM; Thursdays 2:00 PM and 7:30 PM; Fridays 7:30 PM; Saturdays 2:00 PM and 7:30 PM; Sundays 2:00 PM.

OTHER

Website:
ivorytonplayhouse.org

PREPARATION

Please prepare sides for the role you are interested in. Sides may be found at:
https://www.ivorytonplayhouse.org/new-york-equity-principal-auditions-by-appointment-lady-day-at-emersons-bar-grill. Also, please bring your headshot and resume stapled together. Always bring your Equity Membership card to auditions.

Equity’s contracts prohibit discrimination. Equity is committed to diversity and encourages all its employers to engage in a policy of equal employment opportunity designed to promote a positive model of inclusion. As such, Equity encourages performers of all ethnicities, gender identities, and ages, as well as performers with disabilities, to attend every audition.

BREAKDOWN

LADY DAY AT EMERSON'S BAR & GRILL

SYNOPSIS

Based on the legendary Billie Holiday, Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill is a play with music that makes you feel front and center, witnessing the jazz legend herself perform and share anecdotes about her life. The play takes place in March 1959 at Emerson's Bar and Grill, a run-down bar in South Philadelphia, where Holiday performs her well-known jazz songs and charms the audience with her natural joy for music and life.

Though the narrative is historical fiction, Holiday shares real stories about her life, covering everything from love affairs to substance abuse and segregation. The performance is one of her last before her death in July 1959. Holiday is accompanied by Jimmy Powers on piano, a good friend and love of hers, who calms her and helps her as she becomes increasingly intoxicated throughout the night.

SEEKING

Billie Holiday

A brilliant, wounded, and deeply vulnerable icon at a crossroads in her life and career. Billie is performing at Emerson’s Bar and Grill late in her life, grappling in real time with addiction, racism, exploitation, failing health, and profound personal loss. She does not present herself as a tragic figure—but tragedy leaks through her humor, her stories, and most powerfully, her music. Her artistry is inseparable from her pain: every lyric carries memory; every phrase is shaped by experience. The audience isn’t watching a concert so much as being invited into an unguarded communion. Billie shares her truth through song as it is happening, not as something safely in the past.

She is simultaneously professional and ragged, magnetic and fragile, controlled and unraveling. She can charm a room, tease the band, land a joke, and then, almost without warning, cut straight to the bone. Her emotional honesty must be raw, unsentimental, and utterly human. The performance should captivate and enthrall, even as it quietly unsettles. We should enjoy her as much as we worry about her. She is funny, sensual, proud, and stubborn. She is also exhausted, haunted, and lonely. The tension between her iconic status and her visible deterioration is essential: a woman who is both a legend and a person still fighting to survive the night. A fearless storyteller and a deeply intuitive musician. Makes the audience feel that these songs are not being “performed,” but remembered, endured, and survived in front of them.

Jimmy Powers

Black male, 35 or older. Billie Holiday's devoted pianist, confidant, and accompanist, who serves as the grounding force in this play depicting her final, poignant performance. He is a supportive, watchful figure who both enables her drinking and subtly cares for her as she battles addiction and life's hardships, acting as a crucial, silent witness to her raw artistry and vulnerability. Expert piano required.