When Laniece Fagundes reprises her role as Billie Holiday in “Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill,” the “play with music” that runs Jan. 9-18 at City Repertory Theatre in Palm Coast, she won’t be mimicking the inimitable, legendary jazz singer.
“Billie has such a unique speaking voice and singing voice,” says Fagundes, a 36-year-old voice teacher and City Rep veteran who has performed in “Hairspray,” “Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris,” “Jesus Christ Superstar” and numerous other musicals since the troupe’s founding.
“I’m more interested in capturing the essence of what she’s trying to say or what she’s going through than trying to really portray it as herself,” Fagundes says. “She is an incredibly talented and tormented individual, and I would say we didn’t hear any voices like Billie’s before she came about. Now we call it cursive singing – that style of singing that’s more like a throaty kind of . . . I want to say jazzy style, like Adele, like blue-eyed soul. She originated that type of sound.”
CRT previously staged “Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill” in September 2021. For the community theater’s current season, its 15th, seven of its eight scheduled plays will be reprises of past productions – plays that founding artistic director John Sbordone and his City Rep coterie consider among their best.
As with City Rep’s original production of “Lady Day,” the reprise of the two-person play stars Fagundes and frequent City Rep music director Ben Beck, who plays piano as Jimmy Powers, Holiday’s accompanist.
Written by Lanie Robertson, “Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill” premiered in 1986 at the Alliance Theatre in Atlanta and landed Off-Broadway soon after. The show didn’t debut on Broadway until 2014, when Audra McDonald won the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play for her portrayal of Holiday.
Sbordone notes that he recently watched McDonald’s performance on a Broadway streaming service, and even the acclaimed singer-actress “made no attempt at sounding like Holiday. Even in our first program it said there’s no attempt to mimic. Rather, the idea is to get to this essence, the soul of Billie Holiday, which we try to do in theater with every character. The uniqueness of this show is Laniece.”
Set in 1959 a few months before Holiday’s death, Robertson’s semi-fictionalized work imagines one of Lady Day’s last performances, in a seedy South Philadelphia bar, as she’s accompanied by her pianist. With both body and psyche bruised by her tortured, drug-addled life, Lady Day – a nickname given her by her saxophonist friend Lester Young – delivers lengthy, revelatory monologues between performing such songs as “What a Little Moonlight Can Do,” “Gimme a Pigfoot (And a Bottle of Beer),” “T’ain’t Nobody’s Business If I Do” and the classics “God Bless the Child” and the chilling “Strange Fruit,” about the lynching of Black people in the American South.
Both music critics and fans hear Holiday’s turbulent life – the attempted rape she suffered at age 12; her dysfunctional, abusive adult relationships; her encounters with racism as she became the first Black woman to front an all-white band, the Artie Shaw Orchestra, in 1938; her drug and alcohol addictions – reflected in her vocal artistry, her song choices and the sometimes disquieting yet beautiful ways that both vulnerability and vivacity wove through the timbre of her voice.
While jazz trumpeter Wynton Marsalis downplays the effects of Holiday’s harsh life upon her vocal stylings, her voice combines the impish eroticism, and some of the cutesy vocal timbre, of Betty Boop (yes, the 1930s cartoon character) with the world-weariness of someone who ran errands for a brothel at age 12, became seduced by alcohol and heroin addiction for much of her adult life, and served a year in jail on a narcotics conviction before dying in 1959 at age 44.
Tellingly, when Fagundes speaks about Holiday it’s in the present tense – “Billie is” rather than “was” – an indication, perhaps, of Fagundes’s intent to “embody what she was about” rather than mimic the jazz legend.
Fagundes, who was born in Queens, N.Y., but moved to Palm Coast at age 5 with her family in 1994, says she was a “reluctant fan” of Holiday as a youngster “because my mother really, really loved the Diana Ross movie ‘Lady Sings the Blues’ (a 1972 film based on Holiday’s 1956 autobiography that, in turn, took its title from a Holiday song).
“So I watched that so much as a kid, and as a kid I’m like this is kind of traumatic – she’s getting abused, her mom is cussing her out and it was just not something that I really wanted to resonate with,” Fagundes says.
Her grandmother had all of Holiday’s music on CDs, “so I did listen as a teenager,” Fagundes says. “But to say that I had listened to a lot of her music would be an exaggeration.”
Fagundes later gained an appreciation of Holiday: “As an adult, I was like, ‘Maybe being removed from having to watch this movie all the time, I might enjoy this.’ ”
She now sees Holiday as “a one-of-a-kind tormented talent. I’ve watched a lot of documentaries and everyone said she would do more drugs than the men – she would pop a handful of whatever and go on stage like it was nothing. She was a tank – she was known for putting it away and doing whatever.”
Holiday’s life “is a fascinating story, it’s a tortured story, and the play is an amazing piece,” Sbordone says.
City Repertory Theatre will stage “Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill” at 7:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday Jan. 9-10 and Jan. 16-17, and at 3 p.m. Sunday Jan. 11 and 18. Performances will be in CRT’s black box theater at City Marketplace, 160 Cypress Point Parkway, Suite B207, Palm Coast. Tickets: $30 adults, $15 students, available online at crtpalmcoast.com, by calling 386-585-9415, or at the venue one-half hour before showtime. The play contains mature language.
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