'Lady Day' gets music right

I've just seen my fourth one-woman show in as many months this year. If anyone wondered whether theaters are playing their cards conservatively in these hard economic times, this is at least anecdotal evidence they are trying to keep labor costs down. Theatrically, it does not cheat us, though. This elemental means of telling a story brims with variety and intent.

In many ways, "Lady Day at Emerson's Bar and Grill" is the least of this recent crop. On the other hand, none of the others give us Thomasina Petrus channeling the vocal artistry of Billie Holiday. Petrus opened the show Friday at Park Square Theatre in St. Paul. Her singing voice gets the delicate idiosyncrasies of Holiday just right -- that mix of crackle and growl, intimate phrasing and silky tone. Holiday's unconscious genius mixed these qualities -- so contradictory in isolation -- into a unique, mournful instrument.

Playwright Lanie Robertson scripted this 95-minute show around a club gig in Holiday's native Philadelphia, four months before her death in 1959. Only 44 at the time, Holiday's body bore the scars of hard living even as her voice retained its signature cry. The conceit is that Holiday has chosen this small dive as a new beginning. Between songs, she rambles on about her love/hate relationship with drugs and men, her sad early life and stories from the touring years. No revelations here, but this show has never been more than a device for a singer to pipe up. And Petrus does, with pianist Thomas West plunking along nicely on a honky-tonk upright.

She's clearly done her homework in capturing Holiday in song -- sweet with that slightly slurred diction that still caressed each syllable.

The curiosity here concerns Petrus' manner when the music ends. She and director Austene Van have fashioned a robust and lively soul, and perhaps that's justified by the playwright's "new Billie" idea. However, it jars us to hear this fragile creature in song then launch into a rollicking, earthy monologue. The Holiday melancholic subtext (even when she smiled) is put on the shelf. Smacked up on heroin in the latter stages of the show, Petrus' Holiday still misses the weary defeat -- the weight of years -- that might have offered some complexity to her words. "New Billie," indeed, would twist as sad bravado.

In the end, we are thankful for the chance to hear a live singer give us "God Bless the Child," "Strange Fruit," "T'aint Nobody's Business." A little Holiday always seems right.

Graydon Royce • 612-673-7299