STAGE REVIEW : ‘Lady’ Catches Holiday Mood if Not the Music

Billie Holiday, the inimitable Billie Holiday, is at the end of her career and trying to make a comeback in “Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill,” which opened Saturday night at South Coast Repertory in a moody staging by the Orange County Black Actors Theatre.

The setting is early 1959, just months before Holiday’s death of complications from substance (narcotics and booze) abuse, and this ravaged jazz queen is hoping to cast her spell at least one more time. She’s got her best gown on and the trademark gardenia is in place. Never mind all those extra pounds she’s put on, the lady’s still got style.

Trouble is, this old-before-her-years Billie (Debbi Ebert) is on junk, and her voice is almost worn out. She sings, then tells a sad story about her life, then a funny one. Then she sings again. It’s not triumphant, though; it’s more like heartache. Watching her perform is close to witnessing a eulogy for the living.

Director Adleane Hunter envisions the show (created by Lanie Robertson, who described it as “drama in the form of a cabaret act”) as a bittersweet mixture of appreciation and lament. We know early on that this is not going to be a feel-good tribute or a loving revue when Ebert’s Billie appears before the microphone with the half-closed eyes and sluggish speech of the mainliner.

Ebert evokes something of the Holiday style, the phrasings and the accents in songs like “What a Little Moonlight Can Do,” “Crazy He Calls Me,” “Them There Eyes,” and the stunning “Strange Fruit.” But she isn’t Holiday, not by a long step. If that’s what you want, it’s best to go to the record collection. This show isn’t interested in vintage Holiday anyway.

What Ebert does best is hint at the what-used-to-be of Holiday, and, more pointedly, the depths to which she has sunk. The end of the 75-minute show may feel like the last bars of a dirge. But Ebert succeeds in making us feel for Holiday, not as a jazz star but as a broken person.

Robertson’s script doesn’t really have dramatic thrust--about the only tension comes from worrying if the increasingly stoned Holiday will finish all her stories or pass out first--but it does capture the feel of an intimate nightclub performance by someone with tales to tell.

The raw reminiscences, from Holiday’s rape at 10 through her many arrests on drug charges (“I was a candidate for federal housing”), are offered with conviction and humor by Ebert. “Lady Day” may stray from the factual record (Times jazz critic Leonard Feather, in a review of a 1987 Los Angeles production, described some of the show’s anecdotes as “pure fiction”) but that seems almost irrelevant--this is more of an impression of her and her decline than the gospel delivered at a last gig.

As for the staging, Hunter, set designer Edward E. Haynes Jr. and lighting designer Jonathan Wyman succeed in giving SCR’s accommodating Second Stage something of the ambience of a small nightclub. A few audience members are seated at tables next to the bartender (Ron Sage) who keeps filling Billie’s glass, and just below the microphone. Holiday strolls then staggers between them as smoke fills the air above her saxophonist (Gary Bradley) and pianist (John Scott), a couple of guys who know what they’re doing even if she doesn’t.

‘LADY DAY AT EMERSON’S BAR & GRILL’

An Orange County Black Actors Theatre production of Lanie Robertson’s play. Directed by Adleane Hunter. With Debbi Ebert, John Scott, Gary Bradley and Ron Sage. Assistant director Robyn Hastings. Musical direction by Debbi Ebert. Set design by Edward E. Haynes Jr. Lighting design by Jonathan Wyman. Costume design by Prentis Bonds Jr. Plays Tuesday through Saturday at 8:30 p.m., Sunday at 8 p.m. and Saturday and Sunday at 3 p.m. through July 21 at South Coast Repertory Second Stage, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Tickets: $10.50 to $20. (714) 957-4033.