Audra McDonald won a great many awards in New York for her solo performance in Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill – a tribute to the singer Billie Holiday – and I have no doubt that her reception in London will match New York’s.
Lanie Robertson’s script is billed as a musical play. It is, in fact, a cabaret performance with anecdotes and commentary on Holiday’s life. To create the cabaret atmosphere, the seats in the front six rows of the stalls have been removed and replaced with tables and chairs. The audience also sits at tables on the stage.
Lady Day was the nickname Holiday’s lover gave her. Emerson’s Bar was a seedy joint in Philadelphia. It was to be one of her last dates in 1959; three months later she was dead.
The 90-minute cabaret is truly amazing. As Holiday sings, so she becomes less and less steady and more and more rambling. “I am OK,” she protests. It is painfully obvious she is not OK. The audience is watching somebody cracking up on stage. She falls down some steps and the audience gasps, genuinely feeling she really has fallen, so convincing is McDonald’s performance. She is playing to full houses at Wyndham’s Theatre – so it is distressing to learn that Holiday at Emerson’s Bar played to an audience of only seven people.
McDonald is not only a powerful singer; she is also a powerful actress. The play, which is as emotionally draining for the audience to watch as it is for the actress to perform, is not to be missed.
Bat Out of Hell takes its name from the Meatloaf album, originally released in 1977. It was one of the most influential albums of all time. It contains seven major hits, 43 million copies have been sold worldwide, and Jim Steinman has now turned the album into a jukebox theatrical spectacular.
The only reason for going to the London Coliseum, though, is for the songs. Nobody will be going for the crass futuristic story set in a post-apocalyptic Manhattan ruled by a tyrant. Jay Scheib’s over-amplified production is notable for the ugly and unimaginative vigour of its choreography.
Ferdinand von Schirach’s Terror at Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, is not your usual TV courtroom drama. Histrionics are eschewed. A hijacked plane is heading towards a packed football stadium. Ignoring orders, a fighter pilot shoots the jet down, killing 164 passengers. But by so doing he potentially saves 70,000 lives. Faced with an impossible choice, he chose the lesser evil and was immediately arrested.
So is he a hero or a murderer? The audience is asked to vote. I do not think there can be any doubt as to how audiences will vote; though, having said that, audiences in Japan found the pilot guilty.
American playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Gloria at Hampstead Theatre is set in the offices of a notorious New York magazine and is a satire on office politics. Ambitious, frustrated editorial assistants fight among themselves when they discover there are enormous financial rewards in being a survivor of a terrible disaster. The public is always hungry for eyewitness accounts of morbid events.
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