by Douglas Messerli
Lanie Robertson (libretto), songs sung by Billie Holiday sung by Audra
McDonald Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill / 1986, the filmed TV
production I watched on July 17, 2020 was from 2016
I had so long postponed
watching the work for some of the very same reasons that the theater critic of
the Los Angeles Times, Charles McNulty observed: “I must confess that I
had my qualms. When one recalls
Holiday’s sublimely ruined sound at the end of her career, the period in which
Lanie Robertson’s concert drama is set, one doesn’t think of McDonald’s
soaring, Juilliard-burnished soprano, a gold medal voice still in its athletic
prime.”
What I had entirely
forgotten was that “The Day Lady Died”—the title of one of my favorite Frank
O’Hara poems who last three stanzas read—
I go on to the bank
and Miss Stillwagon (first
name Linda I once heard)
doesn’t even look up my
balance for once in her life
and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I
get a little Verlaine
for Patsy with drawings by
Bonnard although I do
think of Hesion, trans.
Richmond Lattimore or
Brendan Behan’s new play or
Le Balcon or Ne Nègres
Of Genet, but I don’t, I
stick with Verlaine
After practically going to
sleep with qundariness
And for Mike I just stroll
into the PARK LANE
Liquor Store and ask for a
bottle of Strega and
then I go back where I came
from to 6th Avenue
and the tobacconist in the
Ziegfeld Theare and
casually ask for a carton of
Gauloises and a carton
of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK
POST wit her face on it
and I am sweating a lot by
now and thinking of
leaning on the john door in
the 5 SPOT
to Mal Waldron and everyone
and I stopped breathing
—actually occurred on July 17,
1959.
Well, I didn’t at all have to be skeptical about McDonald’s performance. Not only does she appear to get most of Holliday’s eccentric lyrical phrasing right, her often drop of the final syllables, and the intense alternation of alto and soprano vibrato, but she quite stunningly portrays Holiday in the last days of her life in which the great singer was not only alcoholic—which makes for some highly dramatic dips and near falls, particularly when she attempts to take the few steps down into the audience space—but very much still under the influence of heroin, the marks of which she has attempted to cover over by wearing long white half-gloves that perfectly match what critic Marilyn Stasio described as “a while column gown.”
McDonald also fragmentarily tells some of her life story through the use of what singers generally describe as banter between numbers—even though, in this case, the talkative interludes slowly begins to outnumber the music. Holiday first explains her distaste of even being in Philadelphia, where Emerson’s exists, relating one of her favorite quips: “I used to tell everybody when I die I don’t care if I go to Heaven or Hell long’s it ain’t in Philly.” Later, she reveals the reason: it was in the city of “brotherly love” that a judge sent her away to prison for possessing drugs, possibly smuggled into her suitcase by her then lover the trumpeter, Joe Guy, who introduced her to heroin. Her jail sentence resulted in her losing the all-important New York license to play in cabarets and clubs, which she explains is why she is now at Emerson’s.
Of course, at no time in her life did
Holiday reveal, particularly s banter between songs, so much detail about her
painful life. As Stasio writes:
“Robertson’s script is unrealistically stuffed with just about every known biographical detail about her unhappy life. The mother (“the Duchess’) who go her chubby little girl her first housecleaning job in a whorehouse. The humiliations she endured traveling on club dates through the segregated deep south. The rotten bad luck of falling in love with a no-goodman who got her hooked on heroin and set her up to take the fall on a drug charge. All that, plus the appalling injustice of losing her cabaret card and being banned from performing in New York:
By the time near the end, so drunken that she has descended to the bar to pour herself her own fresh drink, we are hardly surprised when Holiday somewhat offhandedly describes that as a young girl she was raped. The story that proceeds of her performance of the classic “Strange Fruit,” describes her travels with Artie Shaw through the South in which she was forced to eat in the kitchen and could only enter and exit through it. Having to urinate badly, she attempts to find out where “the colored bathrooms” are, but before she can uncover that secret, she is confronted by a highly bigoted waitress who tells her, in no uncertain terms, that there are no colored bathrooms in this establishment, and that Holiday is most definitely not wanted in this restricted world. Tired of the abuse, Holiday squats and pisses all over the legs and feet of her merciless foe.
Thank heaven, between these
extremely dramatic revelations, McDonald still has the opportunity to sing some
of Holliday’s greatest numbers, including the bawdy “Pig Foot (and a Bottle of
Beer)” and “Tain’t Nobody’s Business If I Do” and “When a Woman Loves a Man,”
and—after a break to get a heroin fix—the song she wrote for the Duchess, a
somewhat bitter cry after she had been rejected a loan from her mother, “God
Bless the Child.” But it is perhaps the song that is most unrepresentable of
her general oeuvre, “Strange Fruit,” that literally takes one’s breath away.
What’s truly fascinating
about this work is in the renewed protests of “Black Lives Matter,” Holiday’s
comments and life in general summarize so many of the current summaries of
blacks wherein this theatrical vehicle, what many might simply describe as a
musical entertainment, reiterates the issues of today.
This Lady Day, filmed for
TV at McDonald’s performance at Café Brazil in New Orleans in 2016, reveals the
great bisexual singer as quite literally falling apart, yet still able in
wise-cracking memories able to make even the sourest patrons giggle and through
her singing force everyone to “stop breathing.”
Los Angeles, July 20, 2020
Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (July 2020).
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