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Katrinah Carol Lewis as Billie Holiday (photo by Birgitte Tingley).
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Katrinah Carol Lewis as Billie Holiday (photo by Birgitte Tingley)
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Katrinah Carol Lewis as Billie Holiday (photo by Birgitte Tingley)
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Katrinah Carol Lewis as Billie Holiday (photo by Birgitte Tingley)
If you arrive early for TheatreLab’s production of Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill (which opens tonight after a preview Thursday), you might score a seat at one of the cabaret tables, where you can imagine yourself sitting in a seedy Philadelphia bar in 1959 and witnessing one of the last performances by jazz singer Billie Holiday, portrayed here by Richmond’s Katrinah Carol Lewis.
“Billie is breaking the fourth wall,” says director Deejay Gray, also TheatreLab’s artistic director. “She’s talking to people. They’re lighting her cigarette.”
Gray says he had wanted to stage a piece that would offer a platform to someone he respects, and when the rights to Lady Day become available, he thought immediately of Lewis, who has appeared on a variety of Richmond stages in productions such as Gidion’s Knot, When Last We Flew, The Color Purple, Carrie the Musical, Human Terrain and Death and the Maiden.
“I directed her in Speech and Debate a couple summers ago,” he says. “She had a small part in that. Ever since then I’ve been itching for the time she and I could jump into something pretty big.”
Aside from some interaction with her accompanist, Lady Day is essentially a one-woman show. “It’s primarily Billie Holiday telling stories and singing songs about her life.”
And there are lots of stories to tell, from a poverty-stricken childhood in Baltimore to her arrest on prostitution charges in Harlem, to singing in clubs and later finding success as a recording artist who worked with orchestras led by Count Basie and Artie Shaw. Holiday was no stranger to stormy relationships, and one of her most famous songs, “Strange Fruit,” is about lynching.
After battling heroin addiction, Holiday died in 1959, which would have been not long after the concert depicted in the show. Gray notes that the playwright, Lanie Robertson, has said the impetus for writing the piece was that a partner of his had seen one of the last concerts Holiday had ever done. “His partner had said maybe six people had shown up to see her,” Gray adds.
Lewis is “one of the few performers that I know who can handle the singing challenges and the acting challenges that a piece like this merits,” he says. “She is very well equipped at both, so it’s really thrilling to watch her do all of those things.”
The show contains a lot of history from Holiday’s life, Gray says. “It’s been cool to navigate around what’s real and what Billie is exaggerating, because there’s some of that, too. The thing I think Katrinah is most excited about is not duplicating the person — we didn’t want to just do a character piece. We wanted to breathe in the essence of this amazing, complicated person.“
See Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill through Dec. 12 at TheatreLab’s Basement space, 300 E. Broad St. 505-0558 or theatrelabrva.org.
