Women's stories on stage: 'Lady Day at Emerson's Bar & Grill'; 'Fever'

Two legendary singers, Billie Holiday and Peggy Lee, inspired a pair of new shows currently playing in Seattle. Here is our take on them:

'Lady Day at Emerson's Bar & Grill'

The most common image of Billie Holiday is that of a handsome, lush-lipped black woman, with a white gardenia in her hair and a sense of doom about her.

Lanie Robertson's concert-play "Lady Day at Emerson's Bar & Grill" can easily perpetuate that vision. It imagines Holiday gigging in a Philadelphia club near the end of her too-brief life. (She died of heart failure in 1959, at age 44, while under arrest for heroin possession.)

But in the laudable Strawberry Theatre Workshop staging of the oft-produced piece, actress Felicia Loud doesn't limit herself to tragedy-queen-on-the-skids clichés, under MJ Sieber's sensitive direction.

On the bandstand, and weaving among theater patrons seated at tables, Billie's substance-induced tipsiness is not overplayed, as it so often is.

Loud (who in 2004 starred in a previous production of "Lady Day" at Langston Hughes Performing Arts Center) endows the jazz icon with a salty, matter-of-fact candor largely devoid of self-pity.

Of course, Holiday's saga is tragic, in ways the script's stagy, loosely biographical, between-song patter stresses.

Holiday tells us about how a lover-manager (the kind that singer Billy Eckstein called a "damager") seduced her into hard-drug use. She describes the virulent racism she faced in the South touring with Artie Shaw's band. And her teasing put-downs of white people are tinged with rage.

We also hear of the frequent, punishing drug busts that robbed Holiday of the "cabaret card" needed to work in New York clubs.

But Loud also gifts us with the proud, vibrant charms attributed to Holiday by those who knew her well — her keen wit, generosity to loved ones, skill as a (profane) raconteur.

Also impressively, Loud distills Billie's sui generis singing style without trying to ape her note for note.

An excellent singer, Loud pinches her hearty voice back to evoke Holiday's subtle phrasing, in nuanced song renditions that can be coy and flirtatious, or hauntingly plaintive.

"Lady Day" features a batch of signature Holiday tunes (i.e., "God Bless the Child," "Strange Fruit"), backed by pianist Ryan Shea Smith and drummer LeNard Jones.

Though better later, the accompaniment is too thin on the opening tunes. And the interplay between Loud and Smith is handled so clumsily it's basically tossed away.

As it draws to a close, the 75-minute show makes you want to listen again to the real Lady Day on disc — not to obliterate Loud's laudable performance, but to extend its pleasure.

Plays today and Saturday; and Thursdays-Saturdays and Mondays Oct. 1-12 at Erickson Theatre Off Broadway, 1524 Harvard Ave. S., Seattle; $10-$25 (800-838-3006 or brownpapertickets.com).

Misha Berson, Seattle Times theater critic

'Fever: Plays Inspired

by the Music of Peggy Lee'

Peggy Lee, award-winning jazz and popular singer, composer and actress, was best known in the years before rock 'n' roll. Yet she was an influential musician into the 1990s, providing inspiration to artists as varied as Paul McCartney and Madonna. Few in America didn't know and enjoy her music.

Live Girls!, the theater devoted to the work of women playwrights, offers "Fever: Plays Inspired by the Music of Peggy Lee" in tribute to this lauded female songwriter and performer. For this production, it commissioned three women playwrights to create one-act plays, each prompted by one of Lee's songs.

The concept is certainly interesting. Unfortunately, its realization doesn't live up to its promise.

Molly Best Tinsley, inspired by Lee's "Is That All There Is?," uses some details from Lee's life to imagine what it must have been like when a small-town North Dakota girl first encounters the life of the theater.

Joanna Horowitz uses "It's a Good Day" as her starting point. She presents an apocalyptic scene played out in a seedy nightclub.

Jessica Chisum, inspired by Lee's songs from "Lady and the Tramp," offers a takeoff on this tale of cats and dogs and gives it a surprise ending.

The first two plays are disjointed and unpolished. Both would benefit from rewrites. The "Lady and the Tramp" script holds together more effectively, and Laurel Ryan and Stephani Thompson make the most of their roles as cats.

In all three works, however, the acting lacks subtlety. The fault seems to be as much because of heavy-handed direction as it does because of the limitations of the actors.

Today and Saturday. Produced by Live Girls!, 2220 N.W. Market St., Seattle; $5-$15 (800-838-3006 or brownpapertickets.com).

Nancy Worssam, special to The Seattle Times