Review: BILLIE HOLIDAY FRONT AND CENTER Offers More Music, Less Show

The life of iconic jazz singer Billie Holiday was a tumultuous nightmare of abuse and racism, drugs and depression, and a desperate search for human connections. Years of alcoholism ended her life at just 44. Holiday's unhappiness makes her anointment as one of the most influential and revered singers of all time that much more poignant - through darkness, there is light.

Many storytellers have tried to do right by Holiday, none succeeding, and, unfortunately, her extraordinary tale finds no worthy expression in the Fremont Centre Theatre's new one-woman show, Billie Holiday: Front and Center.

Directed by B'Anca and written and starring singer Sybil Harris, the production is billed as "a show with songs." The latter part is certainly true. Harris, who first took on Holiday in the Smokey Robinson-produced Sang Sista' Sang in the late '90s, emotes a well-honed and delicate impersonation of the icon in song. It's when the drama comes in that she stumbles.

There is, in fact, no dramatic structure to the story at all, and the series of glimpses from Holiday's life, in which Harris portrays a multitude of characters, are messy and mild. Told in a near-whisper, there is no passion, no connection, and the events unfolding are often hard to make sense of -- anchored to nothing, they fade in arbitrarily and leave so subtly that the audience doesn't even realize when intermission arrives.

One-person shows are difficult to perform, and even the most seasoned actors will avoid them unless their skill set is of the highest order. It's therefore mind-boggling that Harris would be allowed, with such meager dramatic chops, to attempt one. Clearly, her sincerity and passion are the motivators, but the ability to inspire an audience through song never ensures that a singer can convey the straight scenes.

Ironically, this was also true of Holiday. Forced by financial woes to appear in a single feature film, 1947's New Orleans, Holiday's acting is painfully wooden - until she sings. Then she owns every frame of celluloid. Harris, at least at this point in her career, suffers from the same inability to bridge the two crafts - a lofty task that eluded many other great performers, from Ella Fitzgerald to Elvis Presley.

Fortunately, the second act of Billie is mostly filled with Harris' fine singing. The on-stage quartet, some of whom occasionally retire their instruments to appear as characters in the show (which breaks the consistency of the one-actor idea), is expertly led by pianist and musical director Cassey McCoy. Fritz Wise adeptly commands the drums, Michael Saucier plucks a sensuous base, and saxophonist David Patterson lifts the room with his horn. It is in these moments of musical beauty that Harris shines, and one wishes she'd either been given a cast of professional actors to support her, or had chosen to focus on a straight musical tribute to the legend -- one I'm certain even Holiday herself would have enjoyed.

Photo Credit: Scott Morgan Photography

To post a comment, you must register and login.