Lady Day At Emerson’s Bar and Grill

Musical, Play (2014)
by Lanie Robertson
Music Arrangement by Danny Holgate
Directed by Candice Handy
Merrimack Repertory Theater
Lowell, MA
February 5-23, 2025

With Jenece Upton (Billie Holiday), Jorden Armir (Jimmy)

Billie Holiday’s (Jenece Upton) performance in South Philadelphia in March 1959, just a few months before her untimely death at forty-four, at a site designated as Emerson’s Bar and Grill, serves as the vehicle for recounting the story of her life. Equally significantly, it traces the tonality of its emotional ups and downs through a series of songs seasoned amply with interspersed autobiographical monologue. Upton’s Holiday holds forth distinctively and eloquently with both song and narrative while Jimmy (Jorden Amir) provides competent and dutiful accompaniment at the piano.

What a compelling and wonderful performance this is, conveyed with the vocal and thespian artistry of Upton who carries the drama of the show singlehandedly – with the capable support of Jorden Amir’s piano and an occasional piano solo – for the better part of two hours. (At this performance, Jorden Armir filled in for regular David Freeman Coleman and did a terrific job.)

Upton manages to grasp Holiday’s unique vocal style – burnished, intensely condensed, and packed with potent mineral salts – without turning the performance into a parody. As with Timothée Chalamet’s embodiment of Bob Dylan in the recent A Complete Unknown (2024), Upton’s Holiday is no caricature whatsoever but retains enough of the distinctive earmarks of her character to convey it most convincingly.

This story in song and words is transmitted with the recognition that Holiday was a heroin addict and alcoholic. Upton manages to give a vivid sense, before and after the scene in which she goes offstage to shoot up, what a powerful direct effect the drugs had on Holiday. She speaks openly about her trajectory with heroin, giving a clear account pf having fallen into its use because of love and not being able to disconnect from it subsequently. Upton’s capacity to seem normal and connected before the shooting-up episode, and seeming completely zonked afterwards, is an example of her deft capacities to embody her character’s ups and downs.

Holiday’s story revolves around her early and painfully intense romance with Jimmy “Sonny” Monroe and the expectation he put on her to join him in drug land. She talks about him as though he were a tender little boy, and how that vulnerability worked its way into her soul. Failing to resist his charms led to her falling head first into the habit that spelled her ultimate decline and downfall.

Along with this account of her love affair and its tragic consequences, go the account of her imprisonment, in 1947, also caused by Monroe who had stashed his heroin in her suitcase while they were traveling. When, as she describes it, she was told by the authorities that she could cop a suspended sentence by entering a plea of guilty, she did so, but received a yearlong jail term instead.

Both the extreme beauty and extreme sorrow of the great Billie Holiday comes out in the performance. Sad, drugged, romantic and pained, Upton’s Holiday retains an articulate intelligence. In an anlytic moment, she clearly delineates herself as a jazz singer, not a blues singer, though she says she is indeed a jazz singer with a blues edge. Upton’s performance presents Holiday as precisely that, as an innovative improviser with a mastery of tone and a unique capacity to squeeze the tragic nectar out of a whatever she touched, turning singular tunes into emotional epics.

Many terrific songs fill out this program, capped off by Holiday’s iconic version of Strange Fruit (1939), the arresting ballad about the lynching of Blacks in the South.

With a relatively simple setup of a gig at a bar, this depiction of a concert set seems at once like a night out and a journey through a lifetime, and Upton carries us along that road with grace, dramatic conviction, and tonal beauty.

– BADMan (aka Charles Munitz)