Lady Day at Emerson's Bar & Grill recounts Billie Holiday's life story through the songs that made her famous. 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.
In Lady Day at Emerson's Bar and Grill, a late entry in the Broadway season, McDonald has taken on the task of impersonating a real person in what's virtually a solo show about the late jazz singer Billie Holiday, whose rough life story is almost as familiar as her distinctive sound...McDonald doesn't let Holiday wallow as she tells us, almost offhandedly, about her rape at 10, her prostitution at 14, the macabre death of her great-grandmother, a slave, and the racism that haunted her career. Long before we are shocked, yet again, by the haunting images of her great song about racism, "Strange Fruit," this amazing actress and this jazz icon are indivisible.
But little of that matters once McDonald takes the stage. So immediately stunning is the accuracy of her replication of Holiday's timbre and inflections at that point of her life that many of Thursday night's audience responded with applause a mere eight bars into her opening performance of 'I Wonder Where Our Love Has Gone.' So galvanizing is McDonald's work that it wasn't until midway through the performance that I began to notice images being projected in back of her. Never mind them. You won't want to draw your attention away from Audra McDonald for a moment. As the saying goes, there's a lady on stage, and not only is she an entrancing singer, but she's one hell of an actor.
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