Blue notes PBRC’s poignant Lady Day BY BILL RODRIGUEZ
	Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar andGrill By Lanie Robertson. Directed by Rose Weaver. With April Armstrong and Dean Marcellana. At Providence Black Repertory Company through March 7.

Sad, sad, sad what became of Billie Holiday. But we can’t lament that without also being glad about how Elenora Fagan transformed herself into the remarkable jazz singer also known as Lady Day before her slow decline and abrupt death.

Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill is getting an impressive run at Providence Black Repertory Company, brought to life by April Armstrong and her affecting vocal and acting skills. She is cannily directed by Rose Weaver, who herself headed a memorable run of Lady Day at Trinity Repertory Company in 1993. The evening builds up to a powerful second act that gives us poignant glimpses of Holiday at her prime.

The two-person play is set in 1959, the year that the strung-out singer croaked a final, ragged-voiced recording and died drug-ravaged at 44. We are at a South Philadelphia bar, not even a nightclub, a decade after her peak as a star. She steps uncertainly on stage wrapped in an ermine stole, carrying a signature white gardenia, but by the end of the two-act performance, one elbow-length white glove is sagging almost as low as her spirits.

Her piano player and current lover, Jimmy Powers (Dean Marcellana), tries to pull her out of her head with a bright musical cue whenever her audience patter gets too mournful. But the arc of the evening, like her life, begins and ends at low points. As she sips whiskey, we learn a little about the people and places that shaped her. The first singing she loved was by Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith, songs from a Victrola in the Baltimore brothel parlor at Alice Dean’s, where scrubbing floors was the least of the girl’s work.

Holiday once said that singing came as naturally to her as eating roast duck, and she loved roast duck. In this account, she says she discovered she could make a living with her voice only after a ludicrous dance audition, when the piano player said to stop wasting his time but, kindly, asked if she could sing. He and the Harlem nightclub owner were impressed, and so was the New York music scene in the early 1930s. She cut her first record three days after her idol Bessie Smith cut her last, a bit of coincidental continuity that makes it look like God is a jazz fan.

Here in 1959 she complains that "singing is living to me, and they won’t let me," referring to a consequence of a 1947 drug bust and year-and-a-day incarceration. The felony conviction meant that her New York City cabaret card was pulled, exiling her from music’s Mecca.

Armstrong has the pipes and the skill at phrasing to deliver a fine evening of music, but at first we don’t know that. In a risky bid to simulate Holiday in decline, she doesn’t try hard to please us with the songs in the first act, even with a boppy up-tempo number like "What a Little Moonlight Can Do." "God Bless the Child," which we learn was written in resentment over her mother not helping out when she was broke, Armstrong sings raw, for meaning rather than musical possibilities.

The restraint helps build dramatic tension that peaks after intermission. Holiday sings "Somebody On My Mind," which Armstrong delivers with slow, sinuous precision and musical control not demonstrated before. After she recounts an incident of racism in the South, Powers tinkles the prelude to "Strange Fruit," and Holiday reluctantly sings the bitter depiction of lynching that she wrote. By the time she is singing "Don’t Explain," a haunting address to an unfaithful lover, Billie Holiday surely is in the house. And, thanks to playwright Robertson’s well-paced storytelling, we have become well-acquainted with the drugs-dispensing boyfriend ("My first lover was my worst lover") who Holiday is thinking about as she sings.

"You can only get where you’re at from where you been," Holiday observes at one point. That might have helped her cope, looking back, with hard times, but we can only wish that her songs had come to us through a less painful life.

Providence Black Rep has tidied up its stage area for this performance, and the smell of fresh paint lingered in the air opening night. There are some small tables for two or three people and two small clumps of chairs in a few short rows, within steps of a bar. The shallow balcony is lined with plush love seats and sofas. It’s a pretty intimate space, particularly fitting for this intense little production.