Dawn Hope as Lady Day
Tweet

Lady Day Revisits London, 12 Weeks at New Players

Lady Day at Emerson's Bar and Grill, the tribute to jazz legend Billie Holiday, returns to London next month, when it kicks off a 12-week season, running from 5 May to 23 July 2005, at the New Players’ Theatre, Charing Cross.

Originally seen at Derby Playhouse, the two-hander - written by Lanie Robertson and starring Dawn Hope as Holiday - had a sell-out run in 2002 at north London's New End Theatre and toured the UK in 2003. The play takes place in 1959, around midnight in the small Philadelphia bar of the title, where Holiday is making one of her last appearances.

Born Eleanora Fagan in Philadephia, Pennsylvania in 1915, Holiday started her career in a Baltimore speakeasy and made her first commercial recording with Benny Goodman in 1933. Over the next 11 years to 1944, she recorded over 200 tracks, including such jazz standards as "God Bless the Child", "When a Woman Loves a Man", "Don't Explain", and "T'aint Nobody's Biz-ness", many of which feature in Lady Day at Emerson's Bar and Grill.

In addition to music, Holiday's life was marked by failed romance, heroin addiction and poverty, a tragedy captured posthumously on film in 1972 with Lady Sings the Blues in which Diana Ross played the singer. The real Billie Holiday died in 1959, aged 44.

Lady Day at Emerson's Bar and Grill is directed by former Derby Playhouse artistic director Mark Clements, who has been newly appointed as the artistic director of the New Players.

The production has musical direction by Warren Wills, who accompanies Hope onstage on the piano, playing Holiday's musical director Jimmy Powers. It’s designed by Chris Crosswell, with lighting is by Alexandra Stafford, sound by Nick Greenhill and costumes by Colin Mayes.

- by Terri Paddock

Related Content