Review | ‘Lady Day At Emerson’s Bar & Grill’ at Wyndham’s Theatre, London
By Ross Semple
Dubbing Attitude’s latest Big Gay Following icon Audra McDonald as “the Meryl Streep of musical theatre” wasn’t an exaggeration. The six-time Tony award winner gets so far under the skin of Billie Holiday in Lady Day At Emerson’s Bar & Grill you’d swear you’d been whisked back to the late 50s for one of the jazz icon’s final performances before she died aged just 44.
The voice, the mannerisms, the pain and poignancy, the car-crash moments as, addled with booze and drugs, she forgets the lyrics or trips down the stairs – McDonald’s isn’t a performance, it’s a reincarnation.
The setting is the Philadelphia club of the title on a night in March 1959, a small venue that’s cleverly recreated in the relatively small Wyndham’s theatre by cabaret seating both on and in front of the stage.
There’s no change of scenery, no supporting players beyond Shelton Becton as Holiday’s pianist and musical director Jimmy Powers plus Frankie Tontoh on drums and Neville Malcolm on bass, no plot as such, just a 90-minute concert where Audra’s Billie tells the story of her life through songs and stories.
And what a life she lived. One or two reviewers Stateside, where the show bagged McDonald her record-breaking sixth Tony in 2014, moaned about the pathos in Holiday’s direct-to-audience banter. But given that she was raped as child, had a whore for a mother, got hooked on opium and alcohol and heroin, was jailed for a year for narcotics possession and died of heart and liver failure, what were said critics expecting?
And Audra never, ever milks the pathos – she just presents the singer warts, wounds, foibles, failings and all and you’d have to be hard as nails not to be moved by Holiday’s often horrible history or by heartfelt renditions of songs like God Bless The Child and Strange Fruit. She’d better make room on her mantelpiece because the Olivier award is surely hers for the taking.
Rating: 5/5
Lady Day At Emerson’s Bar & Grill is at the Wyndham’s Theatre, London, until September 9th
Words by Simon Button