Review: LADY DAY AT EMERSON'S BAR AND GRILL Makes Impressive Return to Merrimack Repertory Theatre

When theater audiences are still praising a production more than 25 years after they first saw it, you know it must have been something special. A 1998 mounting of “Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill” at Merrimack Repertory Theatre (MRT) is one of those shows.

Now through February 23, MRT is striking gold once again with an impressive new production of Lanie Robertson’s play-with-music about the last days of the legendary jazz vocalist Billie Holiday – played to the heartbreaking hilt by the gifted Jenece Upton.

In the 1930s and ’40s, the iconic Holiday – with her one-of-a-kind vocal style featuring her unique phrasing and improvisational riffs – was at the peak of her powers, and had the hit singles to prove it. In 1937 alone, she released 16 bestselling songs, making her the most commercially successful recording artist of that year.

By the 1950s, however, her drug use and troubled personal life had taken a toll on the performer. While her concert bookings in this period included two highly acclaimed, sold-out Carnegie Hall concerts in 1956, she was also often reduced to performing in small nightclubs and bars. In 1959, before she passed away at age 44 from heart failure, Holiday made her final two appearances – at Boston’s Storyville jazz club, then at the Bradford Hotel in the theater district, and the old Flamingo Lounge in Lowell, just up Merrimack Street from MRT.

Playwright Robinson’s one-act drama – set at Emerson’s Bar and Grill, a gritty South Philadelphia saloon – first premiered at Atlanta’s Alliance Theatre in 1986, before playing off-Broadway. The show had its Broadway premiere at Circle in the Square in a 2014 production that earned Audra McDonald the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play.

Under Candice Handy’s well-paced direction, the current MRT production features Upton as Lady Day in a performance that is quite simply stunning. Upton fully inhabits her character – capturing Holiday’s fierce determination, her declining health, and, most impressively, her sometimes coarse but always singular vocal stylings. Upton movingly performs some of the singer’s best-known songs, including “When a Woman Loves a Man,” “Crazy He Calls Me,” “Easy Livin’,” and Holiday’s own compositions “God Bless the Child” and “Somebody’s on My Mind.”

At a recent performance, Upton’s rendering of “Strange Fruit,” with lyrics based on an Abel Meerepool poem opposing black lynchings, had the audience silently leaning in so as not to miss one second of the haunting words. On that number and others, the actor and singer brought forward just how deeply affected Holiday was by her often tortured life, which included racial discrimination, relationships with abusive men, financial downturns, and alcohol and drug addictions.

On press night, and after only one same-day rehearsal, Michael Matlock, filling in as Jimmy for the ailing David Freeman Coleman, provided sterling piano accompaniment for each musical interlude. With Coleman unable to return to the production, the role of Jimmy will be played by Jorden Amir from February 20 to 23.

Wearing a white satin gown and matching opera gloves by Costume Designer Yao Chen, her hair at times adorned with Holiday’s signature white gardenia, Upton looks the part, too. And scenic designer Tony Hardin has created just the right vibe for Emerson’s with a simple but detailed set. Brian Lillienthal’s lighting design well conveys the evening’s mood.

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