LADY DAY AT EMERSON’S BAR & GRILL
The 44-year-old Billie we see is not the woman who played Carnegie Hall. She’s not the confident “jazz singer with a blues beat” (as she calls herself in the play) who sang with the bands of Artie Shaw and Count Basie and recorded with Lester Young, Benny Goodman, and Teddy Wilson. Sure, the voice is there, with all its smoky intimacy. And in 15 selections, ranging from the great “God Bless the Child” to “Them There Eyes,” Jackson shows how Holiday could give a ballad a lush lyricism that disguised the pain and made it seem much more processed than it was. What’s scary is how fast this 1959 Billie, now deep into guzzling gin and shooting the smack that would soon kill her, has hit the skids. (Sardonically, she calls herself “Lady Yesterday.”) Her first words, heard offstage, are: “I can’t!” This night, at least, she can. But Jackson’s Billie is so painfully on edge and out of control that we never lose the feeling that maybe she was right the first time.
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Sharing the lonely stage with Billie is Jimmy Powers, her pianist and last link to reality (Darryl G. Ivey, in a powerful, understated performance). It’s Jimmy who makes sure that Billie delivers her songs before she gets too juiced, who subtly uses the piano to calm her down and cue her back to the next number, and who finally takes over the mike and placates the house–with a marvelous “Ebb Tide”–when Billie runs offstage for a fix. Ivey’s stolid character says little, but his deep patience and persuasive piano tell volumes about how Jimmy keeps Lady from going under sooner rather than later.
