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Lady Day at Emerson's Bar and Grill
Lady Day at Emerson's Bar and Grill
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Author: Lanie Robertson Publisher: Samuel French (cover may change) # of Pages: 36 Pub. Date: 1989 Edition: Acting ISBN-10: 0573681848 ISBN-13: 9780573681844 Cast Size: 1 female, 1 male
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About
the Play:
Lady Day at Emerson's Bar & Grill has long been a
favourite of acting teachers for Female Monologues.
Lady Day at Emerson's Bar & Grill is full-length drama
with music by Lanie Robertson. In a small, intimate
Philadelphia nightclub, the legendary jazz singer Billie Holiday
presents an intimate evening filled with her tales of triumphs and
troubles and performing some of her greatest songs. Lady Day at
Emerson's Bar & Grill is riveting portrait of the lady and
her music.
Lady Day at Emerson's Bar & Grill is a bio-drama with
music about the great American jazz singer Billie Holiday, nicknamed
'Lady Day' and famous for her unique vocal style, as she copes with
her addictions (but still knows how to light up a song). The time is
1959. The place is Emerson's Bar and Grill, a haunt of jazz musicians
in South Philadelphia, a rough place for Holiday because of her drug
convictions and federal drug arrests. It wasn't the place she wanted
to be at what turned out to be close to the end of her career. The
audience is about to witness one of Billie Holiday's last
performances, given four months before her death, on July 17, 1959.
Accompanied by her pianist, Jimmy Powers, she sings more than a dozen
musical numbers (including Strange Fruit, God Bless the
Child and What a Little Moonlight Can Do) interspersed
with salty, often humorous, anecdotes to tell the story of Billie
Holiday's complex life filled with some losses and many triumphs. In
Lady Day at Emerson's Bar & Grill, the cold tones of the
blues meets the heat of the night in this essentially one-woman show
about the greatest Jazz singer that ever lived, Billie Holiday.
Lady Day at Emerson's Bar & Grill premiered in 1986 at
the Alliance Theatre in Atlanta, Georgia, prior to an Off-Broadway
run at the Vineyard Theatre in the spring of 1986. That production
subsequently transferred to the Westside Arts Theatre, New York City,
and became a staple of regional theatres. The play opened on Broadway
in 2014 at Circle in the Square, starring Audra McDonald who
won a best-actress Tony for her performance in the show.
Cast: 1 female, 1 male
What people say:
"The richest jazz singing in
town just now is at [this] subtle absorbing dramatic performance....
Evokes all the sordidness of a woman entirely shaped by suffering....
By the end ... one is filled with an unexpected joy.... Robertson's
play is a spare, shrewdly constructed piece." — New
York Times
"Hurts and exhilarates in just
the right proportions." — New York Magazine
"Original and riveting."
— The Times (London)
"A searing portrait of a woman
whose art was triumphant." — On Stage
About the Playwright:
Lanie Robertson is an American playwright, actor, and
educator, best known for his brilliant one woman plays, including
Lady Day at Emerson's Bar & Grill, the story of Bille
Holliday. Many of his plays were produced in Philadelphia, where he
also taught literature and play-writing at the Philadelphia College
of Art during the 1970s. He has written over 30 plays for regional
and Off-Broadway theater. His plays have been produced in New York,
Chicago, and Philadelphia, and in towns in Virginia, Alaska, and
Maine. Internationally, his work has been produced in Canada,
England, France, Australia, and Japan.
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