Theater Reviews—

Jackson’s Work Leads An Altogether Excellent

‘Lady Day’ At Long Wharf Theatre

By Julie Stern

NEW HAVEN — Long Wharf Theater is offering audiences a rare and powerful theatrical experience in the form of Lanie Robertson’s Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill. The work is less a play, and more a chance to travel back in time to allow the viewer to be present at, and bear witness to, one of the last club appearances of the legendary jazz singer Billie Holiday.

Set only a few months before her death in 1959, the show captures Ms Holiday (dubbed Lady Day by fellow jazz great, Lester Young) at a point when her body, mind and voice are already ravaged by her addictions to drugs and alcohol. Only the constant urgings of her pianist/manager Jimmy Powers can persuade her to cut her rambling digressions and continue with her act.

What begins as a performance that will be embarrassing to watch turns instead into a beautifully crafted and carefully orchestrated pastiche of memories and monologues that come together to tell the story of who Lady Day was, and what drove her down this lonely road. Born Eleanora Fagin in Baltimore in 1915, she moved to Harlem with her mother in 1929, and before she was 17 she had been discovered as a singer with a voice so powerful and wonderful that she would become a star, recording and traveling with greats like Benny Goodman, Lester Young, Count Basie and Artie Shaw.

However, she was also dealing with negative forces: Poverty, racial discrimination and abusive relationships with men would lay the groundwork for a hard and hurtful life. Raped at age ten by a neighbor, she worked in a brothel by the time she was 16.

A love affair with a drug addict led her to become addicted to heroin. Several times she was thrown into jail for possession and was left to suffer the agonies of detoxification, “cold turkey,” in her cell, and finally, at the height of her career she was sentenced to a year and a day in prison, and was stripped of her Cabaret Card – the permit she needed to be able to sing in clubs – for being a felon. The death of her beloved mother in 1944 further propelled her into a downward spiral of drugs and alcohol.

Worst of all were the demeaning cruelties of racial prejudice in 1930s and ‘40s America. When she traveled with Artie Shaw and his all-white band, she was not allowed to eat or use the restroom in the southern nightclubs where they performed, and she had a sardonically funny story of how she took revenge on the chirpy hostess who told her there were no facilities for black women.

The rage and bitterness she felt over the humiliations of her life found an outlet in her music and gave a powerful edge to her voice, and this is conveyed as Ernestine Jackson sings them, especially with “God Bless the Child,” and the haunting protest against lynching, “Strange Fruit.”

These are performed as vintage Holiday, not the hoarse stumblings of her declining years. What is so wonderful about Ms Jackson’s portrayal is that it manages to convey the essence of who Billie Holiday was over the course of her entire career.

The monologues piece together the story of her life, simply illustrated by photos flashed on the wall, while a three-piece band under the direction of Mr Powers provides the musical backdrop.

The sense of immediacy is so great that the audience doesn’t feel like they are watching a show. Rather, they are really in the club, at tables just beyond the stage, and Ms Jackson is not an actress, she really is Lady Day.

At the end, in the throes of memory, as she fumbles to pin the signature gardenia in her hair, people were moved to tears. And then they stood up to give the well deserved standing ovation.