‘Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill,’ the Billie Holiday Story, at City Rep Theatre

‘Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill,’ the Billie Holiday Story, at City Rep Theatre: 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. 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. See FlaglerLive’s preview, “Capturing the Essence: Laniece Fagundes Returns as Billie Holiday at City Rep’s ‘Lady Day’.”