A star of Broadway is portraying a legendary singer in 1959 in a Philadelphia dive of a nightclub. The reenactment will foretell the end of her career as she relates her life of body and soul abuse. There’s music with potent lyrics at every turn of her story. They’re what makes the performance of a biography special. At WBTT, the Emerson stage is backed with red velvet curtains. The color repeats itself in shades on little lamps at the stage’s sides and on posts that define the space where tables and chairs bring patrons up close to the performance area. Lights, changing from normal to deep reds and blues, help set every scene in the show. An energetic three piece band plays “The Lady is a Tramp,” and when its pianist leader pounds especially hard, smoke rises in the air above. Melba Moore as Billie Holiday, a.k.a. Lady Day, comes out to the mic downstage center and sings “I Wonder Where Our Love Has Gone.” She’s wrapped in a draped white gown with (strategic) long, crunched up white gloves. She wears chandelier rhinestone earrings but not her trademark gardenias. She’ll have her audience waiting for them. “I just wanna sing,” she claims but immediately moves into her personal story. “I love singin’ and up in New York they won’t let me.” When she introduces Jimmy at the piano “who fixes things up for me”, she can’t help hinting she might like a romance. Then she seems to resent that he keeps her on schedule. Maybe not free enough too? And so goes a show in which Lady Day spins regrets (“I didn’t have a big voice like Bessie Smith”) and sometimes tries to assert herself (“Jimmy is nodding at me...to act like a star.... but no one is better than others.”). She gets either peevish or potted from drinking all the time. Though Levi Barcourt’s Jimmy gives her notable support, he obviously worries when she feels sick and goes offstage a while. Barcourt provides a surprising amount of drama to the play. He and his musicians aren’t just backdrops. Wise director Nate Jacobs has given them a chance to shine, while never leaving his respected Melba Moore without dramatic impetus. On her way to all but dooming any comeback, Moore’s Billie dons gardenias and sings her hits “God Bless the Child,” “Somebody’s on My Mind”, and the powerful “Strange Fruit.” Mostly, however, Moore lacks the power in story-telling that she characteristically achieves with wonderful sustained endings of certain songs. Moore has hinted in interviews that she needs to work harder at her acting. If she does so, her patter should turn into presenting unbroken distinctive moments with Lady Day.
