Review: Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill by Lanie Robertson. Musical Arrangements by Danny Holgate. Belvoir St Theatre, 14 September – 15 October 2023.

Theatre performance with heart

I recently attended a theatre performance with a strong humanitarian message at the Belvoir Street Theatre in Surry Hills. The show was a combination of cabaret and drama, highlighting many historic social issues and challenges of the early 20th century that still resonate today.

The show portrayed the life and times of African-American jazz singer Billie Holiday in a performance called ‘Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill’. Originally performed in New York Off-Broadway Vineyard Theatre in 1986 at a venue renowned for staging provocative, cutting-edge new plays and musicals. This version of Lady Day is a co-production between the Melbourne Theatre Company and the State Theatre Company of South Australia.

The premise of the production

The premise of the production is that it is set in a south Philadelphia bar at about midnight in March 1959 and is the last performance before Holiday died. This adaptation of Lanie Robertson’s Lady Day is directed by Mitchell Butel, starring Jamaican-born Zahra Newman as Holiday, supported by a marvellous three-piece jazz band consisting of piano, bass and drums.

The staging moves away from a typical biopic and encapsulates many aspects of Holiday’s life in one evening, Butel told ABC Artworks and is not a normal cabaret show. The show does not stray away from the challenges that Holiday faced in her lifetime. These social issues and changes have contemporary resonance, including sexual assault, drug addiction, alcoholism, and racism.

Zahra Newman told ABC ArtsWorks that she wanted to honour the life of Holiday. To achieve this, she and her voice coach, Geraldine Cook, sought out the few primary sources of Billie Holiday. In one of those sources, Holiday states that the name Lady Day was given to her by her sax player, Lester Young.  

Billie Holiday, a musical genius

In the show, Newman pays tribute to the influences on Holiday’s life and amongst them were Holiday’s love of Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong. Holiday was a skilled performer and one of the few African-American singers who toured with an all-white band across the American South. According to Frank Sinatra, Billie Holiday was a musical genius who influenced every major singer of her generation, particularly himself.  

Zahra Newman sings the blues

Singing a range of Billie Holiday’s classics, Newman’s voice filled the room, and the blues have never sounded sweeter. Newman’s powerful rendition of Holiday’s 1930s tune ‘Strange Fruit’ came straight from the heart. Holiday originally recorded the song in 1939, with the lyrics drawn from a poem published in 1937 by teacher and songwriter Abel Meeropol called ‘Bitter Fruit’. The protest song deplores lynchings, mainly African Americans, which reached a peak in the Southern American States at the turn of the 20^th century. The lyrics compare the lynchings to fruit hanging on a tree. The 1939 recording by Commodore sold over a million copies and was adopted by the civil rights movement as its anthem in the mid-20^th century.

The show ended with the audience in raptures. Newman and the band received an enthusiastic standing ovation for a magical performance – a great evening’s entertainment for all, closing with a strong humanitarian message.