Lady Day tells the story of Billie Holiday through story and song

Shakura Dickson stars as Billie Holiday in Theatre Calgary's Lady Day at the Emerson Bar and Grill. (Photo: Trudie Lee)

Theatre Calgary turned into a jazz club Friday night.

Not just any jazz club, either but Emerson's Bar and Grill, a 1959 jazz club in the heart of Philadelphia, Billie Holiday's least-favourite town.

That's the setting of Lady Day at Emerson's Bar and Grill, Theatre Calgary's a drama with music, directed by Ray Hogg, that explores the legendary life of Billie Holiday.

Holiday (Shakura Dickson) arrives on stage, introduced by her piano player Jimmy Powers (Yanick Allwood), and from the moment she lands in the spot, there's no taking your eyes, or ears, off her.

Why would you want to? Holiday's life was the story of jazz coming of age in America, and all the racial complexities that involved, in a divided, segregated country that was as much at war with its own people as it was with global bad guys.

Holiday grew up musically alongside people like Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, and Lester Young, the sax man who nicknamed her Lady Day, whose spirit haunts the stories she tells over the course of the 90 minute-ish run time of Lady Day at Emerson's Bar and Grill.

The play's unorthodox structure has the feeling of a jazz tune – it blends storytelling with Holliday's glorious songbook highlighted by classic tunes like "Ain't Nobody's Business If I Do," "What a Little Moonlight Can Do,""God Bless the Child" and "Strange Fruit," a haunting ballad fraught with images of lynching that rocked the country when Holiday recorded it in 1939 on Commodore Records, after her label Columbia refused to release a song about lynching.

What makes Lady Day at Emerson's Bar and Grill (written by Lanie Robertson) a tough go at times is the obvious toll life as a Black woman has taken on Holiday by the time she reaches 1959, the year she died at the age of 44.

While her musical life was extraordinary, her childhood, on the streets of Baltimore and then Harlem, was brutal and unvarnished. There was a stint working as a prostitute, a bout with heroin that lands her a year in prison and a felony on her record, and a general sense that she was better at choosing songs than husbands and lovers.

Dickson catches the feeling and the sound in a way that feels authentic to the time and to the artist. Holiday's phrasing wasn't like anyone else's, and she could break your heart in a single lyric, and Dickson captures that feeling even if she seems a little young to be playing a legend at the very end.

Whether trading glasses of bourbon or cigarettes or stories, she also has a fine chemistry with Jimmy, her pianist and would-be future husband, who can't quite let go of the feeling that Lady Day is spiralling towards trouble, and that his job is mainly to get her through that night's gig in one piece.

There's also a brief but hopeful appearance by a Chihuahua named Pepi, who provides Lady Day with companionship and the unrequited love that it feels like her legendary life has been lacking from humans.

There's no escaping the racism Holiday was forced to endure, which is especially vivid when Dickson recounts a story about going on tour to the deep south with Artie Shaw in 1938, although there's even some humour to be mined from her horror stories and Dickson delivers a punch line as well as she does a melody.

The set by Brian Dudkiewicz is dominated by the piano, a dangling globe, a spiral staircase and in the background, a reproduction of a painting by Aaron Douglas, called From Slavery Through Reconstruction – which in all likelihood isn't very true to what might have been found in a Philly jazz club in 1959, but which lends a little visual underscore to the Lady Day songbook.

Lady Day at Emerson's Bar and Grill doesn't exactly send you out to the parking lot tapping your toes. It did have a Broadway run back in 2014, but its unsettled musical spirit lies a little east – on 52^nd Street, where jazz clubs dominated and north of that part of midtown Manhattan, up in Harlem, at a time when jazz ruled American music, and its queen was Lady Day.

Lady Day at Emerson's Bar and Grill is at Theatre Calgary through Oct. 3.