Lady Day at Emerson's Bar Grill Reviews

Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill is a five star performance in a three star vehicle. Audra McDonald, the reigning grand dame of American theater, gets to reprise her history making role, and her work is wondrous. Electrifying, terrifying, defiant, wounded, broken, and heartbreakingly fragile, McDonald expresses an entire life in two hours.

Billie Holiday is a tall order for any actress to tackle, as it can be hard to find any entryway into her complicated emotional life, and to render that as an actual person. It would be easier to play her as a doomed icon, but McDonald never goes for the easiest route. Her Lady Day feels emotionally true, from her joys in performing, drinking and swearing to her drug withdrawal breakdown late in the play that’s distressingly candid in its honesty.

Even better is how McDonald contorts her sumptuous and golden voice into Holiday’s cramped, pinched, but evocative vocal technique. It’s not mere mimicry, but something else entirely. It’s like a spiritual channeling is happening whenever McDonald opens her mouth to sing. And sing she does, as Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill is a two-fold play, part info-dump monologues between songs disguised as banter, and part revue of Holiday’s greatest hits.

McDonald does what she can to make these long monologues interesting, which is a lot given her talents, but even her mighty gifts succumb in the end. There’s just so much information she’s forced to recite, and the playwright never successfully wraps it up as confessional banter between artist and audience. By the end, it feels like an encyclopedia entry has been vomited back at you rather than an artist in full breakdown confessing their sins and tragedies.

Still, it’s absolutely essential viewing just to watch one of our greatest performers in full bloom of their gifts and strengths. Problems with the script aren’t fatal, but the pacing does veer off towards the end, since it’s been entrusted in McDonald’s mighty hands. She’s dynamic, exciting, and vulnerable, she’s singing and screaming, and she’s crying and shooting up heroin. It’s one hell of a role, and McDonald milks all of the truth and artistry from it that she can.