Lady
Day Speaks
by Heidi W. Moore
 More
than simply a celebrity-impersonation and a collection
of memorable songs, Lady/Speak/Easy, which recently opened
at New York City’s famed La Mama theater, depicts
the wide scope of events and circumstances that imbued
Billie Holliday’s mournful voice. Two hours tells
two decades’ worth of hardship, life, and love through
music and song, and shows that swing wasn’t always
an expression of joy.
The theater space at La Mama is transformed into 1940s
Harlem booze club, in which the audience members are the
patrons, who share exchanges with the cigarette girls,
drug dealers, pimps, troublemakers, and band members who
inhabit this world. Occasionally an onlooker will dance
with a hepcat, and the hostess will engage other audience
members in conversation—all of which might tempt
one to call this an "interactive" performance,
if the achievement of the actors didn’t make the
term didn’t seem anachronistic.
During a slap-stick vaudevillian routine at the show’s
opening, we learn that Holliday is making a name for herself
in Harlem. Narration throughout the rest of the
performance comes either directly from the women working
at the club who surround Lady Day, or indirectly from
the actions and dialogue of the men, who inform us that
Holliday’s short and tragic life was dominated by
her addiction to abusive men and to drugs.
Born illegitimately to a teenage prostitute in Baltimore
and raised by relatives while her mother tried her luck
in New York City, Holliday (whose real name was Eleanora
Fagan) was raped by a neighbor at age 10. She joined her
mother shortly thereafter in Harlem, where as a teenager
she was arrested, along with her mother, for prostitution.
It was supposedly in one of the bordellos that Holliday
heard her first Louis Armstrong record, and it was as
a teenager that Holliday was first introduced to drugs,
and to a succession of men who beat her and stole her
money.
The show features a total of 13 of Billie’s best-known
numbers, but while Ms. Shearer expertly mimics Holliday’s
signature sound in the first set, her soulful essence
is missing. Shearer’s renditions of "Gimme a
Pigfoot and a Bottle of Beer," and "Swing, Brother,
Swing" capture Billie’s vibrancy and rock the
house. But it’s not until the second set that the
unmistakable sorrow of such a painful life comes through
in Shearer’s voice. Songs like "Solitude"
and "All of Me" are aptly bittersweet and tragic,
and the closing "Strange Fruit" is breathtakingly
powerful.
It is through the music that the racism, sexism, and addiction
that weighed upon Holliday are conveyed, and, indeed,
the musicians are not simply accompanying Ms. Shearer
but are an integral part of the production. The band features
members who have played with Louis Armstrong, Gene Krupa,
Lionel Hampton, Benny Goodman, and the Duke Ellington
Orchestra. Michael Johnson, of Big Rude Jake, is
both the music director and a trumpet-playing member of
the cast. According to the show’s producers,
"The key to understanding authentic swing music is
the understanding of where it came from."
The performance seeks to reveal why swing music is more
than just dance music, and to communicate the danger and
tension from which the music was born. In this regard,
Lady/Speak/Easy isn’t so much a play depicting the
life and hard times of Billie Holliday as a performance
piece that reveals why Lady Day sang the blues, and sang
them so well.
Lady/Speak/Easy plays through February 18, 2000 at La
Mama Experimental Theatre 74 E. 4th Street, #A New York,
NY;
ph: 212.475.7710 Thursday – Saturday 10:00 pm, Sundays
5:00 pm.
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