Billie Holiday is onstage dwindling before our eyes, struggling to sustain the fire that brought her to this moment. She’s already told her audience, “You can only get to where you’re at by way of where you’ve been,” and this iconic performer has been to hell and back — whorehouses, prison, addiction, heartache — but she’s still here, barely.
The Billie Holiday portrayed in Lanie Robertson’s Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill comprises a fascinating, tragic triple image, a performance of a performer performing the role of someone who isn’t still messed up on heroin.
Declaring herself “the new Billie,” Lady Day enters prepared to bare her soul. It’s 1959, and at this point in her turbulent life and career, her troubles have become infamous — she has nothing left to hide. Yet, she still tries damn hard to fool us, and perhaps herself.
Old habits die hard, especially for an addict, and Holiday is caught between confessing her sins and covering up her vices, a tension that animates Reginald L. Douglas’s gripping production of Lady Day that opens Mosaic Theater’s 10th anniversary season.
That spiraling tension rides on the performance of Roz White, a vocal powerhouse who impresses with her dramatic take on the role, as Holiday performs at this South Philly nightspot in what might be her last ever live show. Registering vulnerability and grit, humor, sadness, and stubbornness, White’s Lady Day commands the room with songs and stories.
Backed by her band — a trio led by music director William Knowles on piano — Holiday performs hits from her catalog while constantly digressing into tales of her past, like her stint in prison, and multiple marriages and divorces. Being in Philly brings back memories, she says. She and Emerson’s have history.
The production’s immersive presentation, transforming the theater into Emerson’s Bar & Grill, evokes a room with history. Scenic designer Nadir Bey’s brick wall backdrop sets us inside a basement blues bar, an intimate nightclub filled with table seating surrounded by plush banquettes, the whole house bathed in the amber of Jesse Belsky’s lighting.
When White is burning up a number like “Gimme a Pigfoot (And a Bottle of Beer),” one could forget this isn’t an actual nightclub show. White doesn’t really sound like Holiday — she’s more brassy than honey smooth — but handily conveys the mood and meaning of the songs, as in the shift to regret and reflection in “God Bless the Child,” or the melancholy in a snippet of “Foolin’ Myself.”
White glides more surely through the mix of styles and tempos than the band, which sounds stiff at times, like they’re having a hard time staying as loose as Lady Day. Of course, at a certain point, Holiday really loosens up with an offstage hit of heroin that slowly sinks her into a stupor, resulting in some of White’s most arresting work.
Carefully underplaying as Holiday gets sloppier on the stuff, White delivers a believably stoned run through “T’ain’t Nobody’s Business If I Do,” the song Holiday claims as her total philosophy. To the end, the legend vows to live defiantly, a self-proclaimed jazz singer who channels the blues with a passion that pierces the darkness.
Lady Day at Emerson’s Grill (★★★☆☆) runs through Oct. 13 at the Atlas Performing Arts Center, 1333 H St. NE. Tickets are $42 to $80, with discount options for each performance. Call 202-399-7993, ext. 2 or visit www.mosaictheater.org.
If you've ever yearned to see Patti LuPone sport a mullet, now's your chance, thanks to a limited Broadway run of Jen Silverman's comedy The Roommate. With fellow stage and screen star Mia Farrow, the pair are trying to breathe fresh life into a play that has been kicking around the theater world since 2015. The result depends on your ability to overlook well-worn themes and dated humor that makes it feel more like a '90s sitcom.
"Wait a minute!" you might think to yourself. Didn't Patti swear off Boadway? Nearly two years ago, she made an online statement: "Quite a week on Broadway, seeing my name being bandied about. Gave up my Equity card; no longer part of that circus. Figure it out."
Making use of his art to process the pain and confusion of a heinous physical attack, the David Henry Hwang depicted in the brilliantly funny musical Soft Power echoes the David Henry Hwang who wrote the book and lyrics for the show.
Jeanine Tesori, Tony winner for Fun Home and Kimberly Akimbo, composed the tuneful score, and additional lyrics, for the satire, which Hwang had originally conceived of as a "reverse The King and I." The idea, as the M. Butterfly author explained to the audience on press night, was to have a Chinese person come to America, and, like Anna in The King and I, "teach an American ruler something important about civilizing their country."
The original Beetlejuice was, in essence, a slyly original movie about ghosts who are stuck in a kind of purgatory. So it's fitting that a long-gestating sequel to the 1988 classic has been seemingly trapped in development hell as long as the titular bio-exorcist has been, well, dead.
Nixed screenplays with titles like "Beetlejuice Goes Hawaiian" and "Beetlejuice in Love" have come and gone; the original screenwriters have passed into heaven's waiting room; Alec Baldwin has long since aged out of playing 30-year-old hunks; and Tim Burton has spent decades teasing the possibility of a sequel while occupied with more pressing projects like, uh... Dumbo.
These are challenging times for news organizations. And yet it’s crucial we stay active and provide vital resources and information to both our local readers and the world. So won’t you please take a moment and consider supporting Metro Weekly with a membership? For as little as $5 a month, you can help ensure Metro Weekly magazine and MetroWeekly.com remain free, viable resources as we provide the best, most diverse, culturally-resonant LGBTQ coverage in both the D.C. region and around the world. Memberships come with exclusive perks and discounts, your own personal digital delivery of each week’s magazine (and an archive), access to our Member's Lounge when it launches this fall, and exclusive members-only items like Metro Weekly Membership Mugs and Tote Bags! Check out all our membership levels here and please join us today!
You must be logged in to post a comment.