Robert Tanitch reviews Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill at Wyndham’s Theatre, London WC2
Audra McDonald solo performance is a tribute to the great Billy Holiday (1915-1959), the legendary and highly influential jazz singer and song writer, famous for her raw and expressive vocal delivery and improvisational skills.
Frank Sinatra said she was his greatest influence.
Lady Day was the nickname one of her lovers gave her. Emerson’s Bar and Grill was a seedy joint in North Philadelphia. It was to be one of her last dates in 1959. Three months later she was dead.
Audra McDonald in Lady Day
Billy Holiday had had a terrible childhood; raped at 10, she became a prostitute at 14. Her life-style, which was drug and alcohol fuelled, damaged her voice irreparably. It was her abusive husbands who introduced her to opium and heroin. (She wore elbow length gloves to hide the scars).
Audra McDonald has won many awards for her performance in New York. I have no doubt she will win many more awards in London as well.
The 90-minutes, no-interval cabaret is amazing. As she performs she becomes less and less steady and more and more rambling in what she is saying.
“I am OK,” she says. It is painfully obvious Billy Holiday is not OK. It is like watching somebody cracking up on stage. She falls down some steps and the audience gasps, genuinely feeling she really has fallen, so convincing is Audra McDonald.
To create a cabaret atmosphere, the seats in the front six rows of the stalls have been removed and replaced with table and chairs. The audience also sits on the stage.
Audra McDonald at Wyndham’s plays to a full house. It is distressing to learn that Billy Holiday in 1959 when she was at Emerson’s Bar and Grill played to an audience of only seven people.
Lanie Robertson script is billed as a musical play. It is in fact a cabaret performance with commentary on her life and anecdotes. She talks about racial segregation and has a nice line in witty racist abuse.
There is a memorable account of a visit to a restaurant when the owner will not allow her and her party to eat in the dining area. They are asked to eat in the kitchen and pay extra for the privilege. She is also not allowed to use the lavatory because she is black.
The songs include I Wonder Where Our Love Has Gone, When a Woman Loves a Man, God Bless the Child, Taint Nobody’s Business If I Do and, of course, Strange Fruit, the protest song described by Time magazine as ‘the song of the century’.
Audra MacDonald is a powerful singer and a powerful actress. Lady Day is as emotionally draining for the audience as it is for the actress. The performance is not to be missed on any account.
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