'Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill' in NYC

I was down there recently, looking for one of them. An elderly passerby helped me out. “I grew up on this block,” he said. “When I was a kid, I used to see Nat King Cole and Sammy Davis Jr. come out of a bar right there. Billie Holiday, too.” He pointed to an empty lot on the northeast corner. “Yeah, the Emerson Bar & Grill. A lotta music comin’ out of that place.” A lotta pain and heartbreak, too, I learned.

A seedy South Philly bar

I’ve been haunted by Billie Holiday since I saw her reincarnation on Broadway last week by the extraordinary Audra McDonald, in a show called Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill. Playwright Lanie Robertson has chosen a simple format for his moving portrait of Lady Day, as the legendary Philadelphia-born, African-American jazz singer was called — a 90-minute set consisting of a dozen songs, performed in that seedy South Philadelphia bar in 1959 just a few months before her death. High on drugs and booze, Lady struggles through her numbers accompanied by a trio of musicians (piano, bass, drums) who try valiantly to back her up emotionally as well as musically. Between numbers, she retells the painful story of her life, baring her soul with a naked truth that hurts.

When you walk into the Circle in the Square Theatre, you’ll find a three-quarters-in-the-round configuration, with the replica of Emerson’s Bar & Grill in the middle, consisting of a raised stage for the musicians, a clutch of small tables and chairs (where some lucky audience members sit), and a long, curving bar at the other end. As you’re being seated, the musicians play jazz music of the period. Then McDonald, as Lady Day, makes her grand entrance, past the bar, through the tables, and up onto the small stage, to start her set.

“You can only get to where you at by way of where you been,” Holiday begins. She tells her tragic rise-and-fall story with salty humor and heartbreak between songs. Born Eleanora Fagan, she barely survived a traumatic childhood in Baltimore (raised by surrogates, raped at 10). At 12, she joined her mother in Harlem, where they both worked as prostitutes and later served time together in prison. The one bright light in her young years was music. While scrubbing floors to earn a living, she listened to recordings by Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith (“They sorta mom and pop to me,” Holiday says). She began singing in Harlem clubs and was “discovered” at 17, changed her name to Billie Holiday, and became a recording artist by 20 (her saxophone accompanist named her “Lady Day”). By 30, she was a famous jazz singer and composer, working with the best (Count Basie, Artie Shaw, etc.).

Lady Yesterday

But along the way, Holiday had become a drug addict and served a year in prison for possession of narcotics. In her 40s, her addiction, alcoholism, multiple marriages, and string of abusive relationships began taking their toll. When we finally encounter her at Emerson’s in 1959, she was suffering from cirrhosis of the liver and heart disease. “They call me Lady Yesterday,” she tells us.

McDonald’s transformation into Holiday is nothing short of a miracle. This charismatic five-time Tony Award winner, who enthralled audiences with her moving portrayal of Bess on Broadway (The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess, 2012), has given herself over completely to the role. From the moment she enters through that bar — a full figure in floor-length white, with faux-diamond drop earrings and that signature gardenia in her hair — she emanates an aura of stature and sorrow that mesmerizes us. She is Billie Holliday. An opera-trained singer with a beautiful, full voice, McDonald abandons her own and replaces it with Holiday’s special blend of rasp and honey to perfection. She delivers the songs with an aching smile, punctuated by those sliding diphthongs that are Holiday’s signature (“Oooo, what a little moonlight can doooo-ah”). It’s a selfless performance of one star (McDonald) completely giving over to another (Holiday).

As she sings the famous songs of the era, one by one (including her own “God Bless The Child”), Holiday begins to break down, physically and emotionally. “Philly’s always been the rat’s ass for me,” she says, charming us at the top, determined to make it through the set. But the weight of her life story is too much to bear, and she stumbles over to the bar to fortify herself with drink, despite the protests of Jimmy, her compassionate accompanist. She tries to alleviate the pain with humorous anecdotes about how her mother (“The Duchess”) taught her to cook pig’s feet, or the night she was performing in a Birmingham, Alabama hotel and was denied access to a segregated restroom (she peed on the floor), or when her lover/drug supplier framed her and she served time in a West Virginia prison (“That’s what’s called a double redundancy”). At one point, she exits (to get drugs), and Jimmy has to take over.

But Lady Day returns and finishes that set. “I want a beautiful home, and some kids. I wanna cook. I want my own club,” she says longingly, as photos of her brief life flash behind her on an upstage screen. She died four months later, at 44.

“Singin’s the best part of livin’ for me,” Holiday keeps saying. I heard a similar line coming from Darlene Love, the African-American singer featured in the new film Twenty Feet From Stardom, who cleaned houses and sang backup when she should have been a star. I heard the line again from two other singers impersonating Janis Joplin and Carole King, in their respective musical bio-dramas on Broadway this year.

The human spirit, expressed through song, is an ultimate triumph over personal tragedy. Thanks to the generosity and compassion of one brilliant voice (McDonald’s), Lady Day sings on.