Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill: Lady Sings the Blues (to Whitey)

Felicia Loud is alternately fierce and pitiful as Billie Holiday
giving one of her last concerts at a small club in South Philadelphia,
not long before she dies of cirrhosis at the age of 44. She begins the
set fragile but relatively sober, then buckles and fades under the
weight of booze and bad memories. And Holiday had bad memories in
spades: raped multiple times as a child, duped into brothel work, sent
to reform school, heroin addiction, violent lovers. Loud shares
biographical tidbits between songs, recalling good times, too: working
with Lester “Prez” Young, her mother (“the Duchess”), being on the
road, dealing with whiteys good and bad (mostly bad).

Normally, Loud is loud. For Lady Day (a role she’s reprising
from 2005, when it was performed at Langston Hughes Performing Arts
Center), Loud has constricted her big, brassy voice to create Holiday’s
low rasps and thin, sharp high notes. Backed by piano man Ryan Shea
Smith and drummer LeNard Jones, her vocal and dramatic performances
electrify the room. She lurches between comedy and tragedy.

But Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill at Erickson Theatre
Off Broadway has an infrastructural problem. Billie Holiday is singing
to black Americans. But we, the Erickson Theatre Off Broadway audience,
are overwhelmingly white—outsiders being offered inside jokes
like “the only difference between us and white folks is that we wear
our black on the outside.” We are not “we.”

This is wasted potential: The inherent racial tension in a show like
this being performed for an audience like this should be wielded like a
weapon—in small ways, like if Holiday were to comment on, say,
the surprising number of honkies at “Emerson’s” that night. (Having to
address the same three black audience members over and over and over
again broke the spell.) Or in large ways, like splitting the show into
two acts, transforming the audience environment itself by making the
first half “for whites” and the second “for blacks.” But you have to do
something. Instead, you have a bunch of white ladies in the
audience smiling tightly and uncomfortably (white liberal rictus!)
while Holiday rails about skinny white bitches. It’s fascinating drama,
in its own way. But it seems wholly untapped.