Rising from obscurity to become one of the most emblematic singers ever, but largely dismissed before his death in 1959 at just 44, on vacation is a history of world-class talent felled by personal tragedy, racism and substance abuse.
"Extraordinary" is also a word I would use to describe the production of Thalian Association "Lady Day at Emerson's Bar and Grill," which is running at the Red Barn Studio until June 28. It is run by a riveting performance in the title role by LaRaisha DiEvelyn Burnette, who has been a leading singer and actor in a half dozen shows over the last couple of years, but has never owned the stage as he does in "Lady Day".
The music - or play music, if you like that better term - was a Broadway hit for Lanie Robertson in 2014, although first wrote "Lady Day at Emerson's Bar and Grill" in 1986. It is intertwined monologues with more than a dozen songs in the final performance recreation holiday in a seedy nightclub Philadelphia just four months before his death accelerated addictions to heroin and alcohol.
Over 100 minutes, show-intermediate free, we learned about raising the holidays in Baltimore, where she was born Eleanora Fagan. Of his brushes with the law (who spent a year in prison for drug possession) and sentenced romances. And his great love for his mother, she calls the duchess, and his deep need to be a singer and an artist. The game involves restrictions on their art - after his felony conviction, he could not get a cabaret license, and therefore could not take place in New York - as well as the entrenched racism of the time, and He played an important role in leading it in the ways of self-medication and addiction. Some of his lines sound sadly relevant, as when he says that "arrest is a tradition of color."
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