In State Theatre Company\u2019s newest co-production, with Belvoir Street and Melbourne Theatre Company, the brilliant Zahra Newman and her band recapture and celebrate the vibrant life, loves, torments and timeless music of Billie Holiday.<\/p>\n
Murray Bramwell<\/p>\n
There can be few singers as mercurial as Billie Holiday. Biographer John Szwed says of the more than forty books written about her \u2013 \u201cAll those who have attempted to write about her have discovered there are many Billie Holidays: one lively and joyful, another bitter and doomed to heartache; there is a Billie with a little girl\u2019s cry, and one with an older woman\u2019s growl: an early Billie, a middle, and a late one; a race woman and an international chanteuse; a Billie who was one of the jazz boys, another elegantly backed by violins.\u201d<\/p>\n
Since her death, from cirrhosis, in 1959, her reputation \u2013 her legend \u2013 has only grown more, and her musical accomplishment and invention become more apparent. Her voice \u2013 so expressive yet elusive, commanding yet fragile \u2013 speaks to us from an infinite present.<\/p>\n
She isn\u2019t retro. She shares few similarities with other greats such as Ella Fitzgerald , Peggy Lee or Sarah Vaughan. She sang the blues but was much more than Bessie Smith. She is the quintessential jazz singer but she also excelled in transforming any Tin Pan Alley song she recorded into an instant classic. Almost anything she sang became definitively hers.<\/p>\n
State Theatre Company\u2019s latest production is a splendid tribute to Holiday\u2019s music and the life in which it is embedded. Lady Day at the<\/em> Emerson Bar & Grill<\/em> is a monologue with songs, a cameo jukebox musical which blends commentary on the singer and showcases a range of her songs – some her famous classics, others minor but indicative of the inner struggles and torments of her often-troubled life.<\/p>\n First performed in 1986, playwright Lanie Robertson has set the play in Holiday\u2019s home town, Philadelphia in March, 1959, at Emerson\u2019s, a small club where she regularly performed. This imagined night\u2019s performance takes place just months before the singer\u2019s death. Much of what transpires is grim. Holiday is in poor health from alcoholism and heroin use. On stage she is distracted, haunted, incoherent and rambling, unbearably sad. She is also exuberant and witty, caustic and perceptive, an exceptional singer still able to summon her unique powers and capture us with her genius.<\/p>\n Director Mitchell Butel and associate director (and extraordinary performer) Zahra Newman have taken Robertson\u2019s text and song list and created a production which is as captivating as it is vivid.<\/p>\n Ailsa Paterson\u2019s simple but evocative set \u2013 a compact stage area for the musicians with back-lit blue and white tiling around the edge and rough brick walls bathed in scarlet from lighting designer Govin Ruben, with a forecourt of ten or so caf\u00e9 tables for some of the Space audience. There are fusty old lamp shades with black fringes- a typically unremarkable American jazz club at a time when exceptional music was being made.<\/p>\n The band, featuring musical director, Kym Purling on piano, Victor Rounds on double bass and Calvin Welch on drums is outstanding as the Jimmy Powers Trio, coaching and coaxing Billie back into focus and better spirits as she sashays sometimes raggedly through her set. Andrew Howard\u2019s sound design is exemplary.<\/p>\n As Billie, Zahra Newman is a revelation. From the moment she steps into the spotlight in her ivory satin frock she is galvanising. Robertson\u2019s first person narrative (drawn and emboldened by Holiday and William Dufty\u2019s candid and at times outlandish autobiography) has given Newman a brisk, bawdy, uninhibited voice.<\/p>\n Hers is not an impersonation, although she perfectly captures Holiday\u2019s languid, sometime sardonic inflection, the vibrato, the impish cadence, the nimble shifts behind the beat, and those bursts of emotional emphasis that are startling, not just for their virtuosity, but because they are so subtly apt. In some ways Newman\u2019s voice is stronger than Holiday\u2019s \u2013 as when she channels Bessie Smith for \u201cGimme a Pigfoot and a Bottle of Beer\u201d and \u201c\u2018Taint Nobody\u2019s Business If I Do\u201d.<\/p>\n So many songs are compelling to hear, especially as they have been framed and foregrounded by some heartbreak revelation or wry regret. With \u201cCrazy in Love\u201d she refers to Sonny Monroe, who drew her (like so many other jazz musicians at that time) into heroin use. Much of the detail in Robertson\u2019s account reminds us of the appalling Jim Crow racism at the time \u2013 and its impact on African American musicians touring, in her case with all white bands.<\/p>\n It is a memorable juxtaposition when Billie tells an upbeat story of solidarity from the Artie Shaw band when she is refused access to a segregated bathroom. Its raucously defiant conclusion sets a buoyant mood which is then jolted by a spine-tingling reading of \u201cStrange Fruit\u201d, Holiday\u2019s signature song about lynchings (written by Abel Meeropol under the pseudonym Lewis Allen).<\/p>\n Butel\u2019s carefully managed linking between text and song, the build up and switch, is a key part of the production\u2019s impact. \u201cGod Bless the Child\u201d, \u201cDon\u2019t Explain\u201d and the final song (with the lines- \u201cLove lives in a barren land\u201d) Cory and Cross\u2019s \u201cDeep Song\u201d, are examples of the way Lady Day<\/em> captures feeling rather than just sentiment or mawkishness.<\/p>\n Lady Day at the Emerson Bar & Grill<\/em> could easily have been another exploitative account of celebrity misery. And there are plenty \u2013 Ma Rainey, Janis Joplin, Whitney Houston, Amy Winehouse, Sinead O\u2019Connor. The trope of romantic excess is everywhere and feasted on incessantly. But not here. State Theatre and the marvellous Zahra Newman have navigated through clich\u00e9 and schlock and given us a memorable revival of a music theatre gem.<\/p>\n Lady Day at Emerson\u2019s Bar & Grill<\/em> plays at the Space Theatre, Adelaide Festival Centre until September 9.<\/p>\n InDaily<\/em> August 30, 2023.<\/p>\n https:\/\/indaily.com.au\/arts-culture\/theatre\/2023\/08\/30\/theatre-review-lady-day-at-emersons-bar-grill\/<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In State Theatre Company\u2019s newest co-production, with Belvoir Street and Melbourne Theatre Company, the brilliant Zahra Newman and her band recapture and celebrate the vibrant life, loves, torments and timeless music of Billie Holiday. Murray Bramwell There can be few singers as mercurial as Billie Holiday. Biographer John Szwed says of the more than forty books written about her \u2013 \u201cAll those who have attempted to write about her have discovered there are many Billie Holidays: one lively and joyful, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45,5,15,14,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3537","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-45","category-archive","category-music","category-state-theatre-company","category-theatre"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3537","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3537"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3537\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3538,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3537\/revisions\/3538"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3537"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3537"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3537"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}