REVIEW: Lady Day at Emerson's Bar and Grill Brings Billie Holiday Back

“… the key to the success of this Trustus show lies squarely at the feet of the women involved in its production.”

Katrina Garvin as Billie Holiday - photo by Jerimiah Greene

Had you asked me last week if I knew who Billie Holiday was, I would have answered, Of course! Who doesn’t know about Billie Holiday? 

But I would have been wrong.

I learned how much I didn’t know about Billie Holiday last Saturday night when I attended the second performance of Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill at Trustus Theatre, the company’s first presentation since quarantine.

Set in 1959 at the seedy South Philly Emerson’s Bar and Grill on a fictional night just before her death from Cirrhosis later that year, Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill, written by Lanie Robertson, takes the audience back in time and gives Holiday the microphone to do more than sing. Played by seasoned musical theatre artist Katrina Garvin, Billie Holiday tells her life story in provocative anecdotes in between performing more than a dozen of the title character’s classic tunes.

In an almost disturbingly casual manner we learn throughout the evening how the abuses of her childhood, including a rape at age 10, transformed Eleanora Fagan, which was Holiday’s birth name, into the stage’s Billie Holiday who adopted the name of her father, Clarence Halliday, a jazz musician who had abandoned her and her mother when Eleanora was born. We also learn about Holiday’s struggles with addiction and crippling insecurity both likely resulting from the institutional racism that plagued her professional life from the time she began singing in nightclubs in Harlem as a teenager, to her stint in prison by way of Carnegie Hall, until her untimely death at age 44.

Lady Day premiered in Atlanta in 1986 before moving to Off-Broadway and finally to Broadway in 2014 where it featured the incredible Audra McDonald in the title role. It is remarkable how well the play has held up and how fitting it is that Trustus Theatre decided to present it at this time of a renewed dedication to social justice in the country. The fact that it is essentially a one-woman show, with a musical accompanist, makes it a good choice in our quasi post-Covid times, too.

Lady Day opened to a sold-out Columbia audience and the house was almost full on Saturday, followed by another sold-out show on Sunday afternoon. I don’t expect many empty seats in the run of this show, and the key to the success of this Trustus show lies squarely at the feet of the women involved in its production.

Katrina Garvin, who most may remember from previous Trustus performances like Dreamgirls, In the Red Brown Water, and Constance performing under the name Katrina Blanding, was perfectly cast in the starring role as Billie Holiday. To say that Garvin embodies Holiday is an understatement. Keep in mind that Garvin already brings to the stage exceptional vocal skills but fortified with the wisdom imbued via direction from Jocelyn Sanders and backed up with dialect coaching by Marybeth Gorman and vocal coaching from Katie Leitner, Garvin subsequently delivers a performance that literally takes the audience’s breath away. And this is no small challenge given Holiday’s distinctive vocal stylings.

Garvin conveys all the same pain, frustration, and despondency that Holiday brought to the stage as well as the remarkable talent behind her interpretations of such difficult numbers as What a Little Moonlight Can Do and even Strange Fruit, one of the most painfully powerful songs ever written or performed.

Garvin’s stage partner, Shannon Pinkney in the role of Holiday’s piano accompanist, Jimmy Powers, more than holds up his corner of the stage with exceptional musical chops whether he accompanies Garvin or takes over the theatre for an extended solo while Garvin exits for a brief period near the end of the performance.

Terrance Henderson, Garvin’s musical partner in IndigoSOUL (along with Kendrick Marion), served as movement coach to Garvin, and Colleen Kelly served as stage manager for Sanders. Bad Boy Roy Brasley, Jr. styled Garvin’s hair into an elegant updo with a shock of white gardenias wrapped around the back; Abigail McNeely was costume designer; and Curtis Smoak handled lighting and the simple but convincing set for the show, easily creating the feeling that we were all sipping our drinks as we watched Lady Day at the end of her career and, sadder still, the premature end of her days.

Kudos to Trustus Theatre for bringing us back in our roles as audience members with the perfectly timed presentation of a play that reminds us of the power of art to confront the inadequacies of an imperfect culture.

Lady Day will run through June 20th on Thursdays through Sundays. For tickets and more information, visit Trustus.org.

And be sure to visit the lobby for an outstanding exhibit of art by Lori Isom. (See Below)

Art by Lori Isom.

REVIEW: Longing and Losing in Trustus's Fun Home by Alexis Stratton

There must be some other chances /

There’s a moment I’m forgetting /

Where you tell me you see me

                        --Alison, “Telephone Wire,” Fun Home

It can seem a little screwball at first—this Pennsylvania family with a perfect house and a demanding father, kids running around to clean up crayons and polish the silver, and a song-and-dance number performed by three kids on (and in and under) a casket. In fact, within the first few scenes of Trustus Theatre’s production of Fun Home, I wasn’t quite sure what kind of story I was stepping into.

Yet, as the production progressed, it became clear that these seemingly lighthearted and sometimes darkly humorous moments were just the first steps down a complex, moving narrative of memory, loss, and coming of age.

Based on Alison Bechdel’s 2006 graphic memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, the Tony-award-winning musical of the same name was adapted and brought to the stage in collaboration with Bechdel in 2009 by Lisa Kron, who wrote the book and lyrics, and Jeanine Tesori, who composed the music. It opened on Broadway in 2015 and was hailed for being the first Broadway musical to feature a lesbian protagonist.

Having read Bechdel’s Fun Home (as well as her popular comic series Dykes to Watch Out For and her second graphic memoir Are You My Mother?), I was aware of both the story of Fun Home as well as the politics surrounding it in South Carolina. In 2014, the South Carolina legislature cut funding for the College of Charleston when the university assigned Fun Home as part of its first-year reading project. The controversy resulted in months of protests, ongoing budget cuts, and rising fears regarding academic freedom among university programs and departments. (The university only had funding restored with the promise to use the money to teach the Constitution and other founding documents.)

Yet, while the controversy surrounding the memoir Fun Home grew out of its a portrayal of a young lesbian coming of age in the 1970s and 80s, at the heart of the story of both the book and the musical is Alison’s struggle to understand her father, Bruce, a controlling, emotionally abusive, closeted man who died suddenly when Alison was 19 (as we learn during the first few minutes of the production).

Directed by Chad Henderson, Trustus’s production of Fun Home brings us on a nonlinear journey through memory with adult Alison, played with a masterful mix of humor, pensiveness, and compassion by Robin Gottlieb. Accompanied by the skillful performances of an on-stage band (directed by Randy Moore) and with her narrative tied together by beautifully choreographed transitions, Gottlieb’s Alison invites us into the intimate spaces of her past where we meet her family, her first lesbian love interest, and, most notably, Alison’s younger selves, including the college-aged Medium Alison and the elementary-school-aged Small Alison.

In Trustus’s production, the most delightful moments of the story come through the performances of Small Alison and Medium Alison. As Small Alison, Clare Kerwin brims with a budding sense of self in songs like “Ring of Keys,” which details Alison’s initial recognition of an “old-school butch” in a small-town diner (“It's probably conceited to say / But I think we're alike in a certain way … / Do you feel my heart saying ‘hi’?”). And in practically every scene she appears in, Cassidy Spencer portrays Medium Alison with a comedic and endearing awkwardness, abounding with the nerves and excitement that come with coming of age—and coming out. (Most notable is Spencer’s performance of the song “Changing My Major,” in which she opines about her newfound love Joan, played with gentle confidence by LaTrell Brennan).

Yet, these lighthearted moments only serve to underscore the losses that adult Alison faces, as they are contrasted with escalating conflicts between the mercurial Bruce (deftly portrayed by Paul Kaufmann) and his wife Helen (whose strength and fragility are impressively captured by Marybeth Gorman), as well as his three kids (Clare Kerwin along with Christopher Hionis and Henry Melkomian, who play Small Alison’s brothers). Indeed, the most poignant moment of the musical emerges from this: While adult Alison acts as a sort of narrator of her own experiences throughout the production, she finally enters into one memory that leads to a heartbreaking duet (“Telephone Wire”) between Gottlieb and Kaufmann—and perhaps the most powerful performance of the whole production.

There is a sense of loss that pervades the musical—of a father’s image, of a family’s relationships. In the end, we sit with Alison in her joy and her grief, and we long with her, too—just one more moment, just one more—

It’s in that tension between memory and reality, adulthood and youth, longing and losing, that the impact of Fun Home is truly felt.

Alexis Stratton is a writer, editor, and film maker from Columbia, SC whose work has been published in a range of publications; they love bowties, social justice, and good art, and they think heaven must be a kind of library.

What: Fun Home

Where: Trustus Theatre, 520 Lady St. (www.trustus.org)

When: Thurs.-Sun. through April 14

Cost: $30 Thursdays and Sundays; $35 Fridays and Saturdays; $25 students (group discounts available)

Contact: 803-254-9732

REVIEW: Fun Home - The Queer Musical I Did Not Know I Needed

by Connie Mandeville

When I told my partner she was lucky enough to be my date to a musical that had a lesbian lead character, she was less than thrilled. “A musical?” she asked. Her skepticism was understandable. Accurately portraying the complexity of coming out on a stage through song and dance seems farfetched. But as we watched Alison Bechdel’s story unfold, we both saw parts of our own stories, our own struggles, but also our own victories in her experiences.

Fun Home depicts the story of a queer woman who grew up in a rural Pennsylvania town during the 1960s and 1970s. It also follows her journey of discovering her sexual orientation as a college student at Oberlin College in the 1980s. Based on the tragicomic memoir, the story is told by an adult Alison (performed by Robin Gottlieb) while she forces herself through both the happy and painful memories of growing up and coming out of the closet ultimately to write her book. These memories are portrayed through flashbacks with a small Alison (performed by Clare Kerwin) and a college-aged Alison (performed by Cassidy Spencer), and as revealed in the opening scene, these flashbacks are clouded by her father’s (performed by Paul Kaufmann) suicide. Although Alison is the center of the narrative, Fun Home is also the story of her parent’s tumultuous relationship because of her father’s bisexuality and extramarital affairs which led to his death. Her father’s experience living in the closet is touching, but her mother (performed by Marybeth Gorman) triumphs as the tragic hero of the tale because of the sacrifices she made not only to maintain appearances of a perfect nuclear family, but also to keep her family together.

What is so refreshing about the coming out story and queer experience in Fun Home is the balance of both the blissful excitement and the excruciating heartbreak of discovering one’s sexual orientation. It is not an exploitation of queer pain, but instead a celebration of self discovery which is emphasized by solos wonderfully performed by Kerwin and Spencer. From Alison’s nervousness and excitement to attend her first Gay Straight Alliance meeting, to her feelings of validation at her very first sighting of a butch woman, this is more than just the story of her parent’s rejection when she first came out to them. Alison even has a moment of complete ecstasy the first time she sleeps with another woman, a moment so groundbreaking she burst out into song about changing her major to sleeping with her new girlfriend. Although the pains and pleasures of coming out are weaved together to create an accurate representation, Alison’s masculine gender expression is often conflated with sexual orientation which is inaccurate and borderline transphobic. A young girl rejecting dresses and other gender stereotypes does not always lead to a lesbian identity, and there are many transmen who date men.

In the wake of the MeToo Movement, there were aspects of Fun Home that were problematic. Her father is a teacher who had sex with male students who were underage, which is not only statutory rape, but it also perpetuates the stereotype of gay men preying on young men. Her father’s predatory behavior is never fully addressed except for one flippant comment from her mother. It is understandable to overlook her father’s abuse of power not only because of the circumstances of his death, but also because it is difficult to fairly judge someone you love so much. Additionally, Fun Home, both the tragicomic and musical, was created before the MeToo Movement went viral so the writers most possibly lacked the social context to delve into Alison’s father’s crimes.

Despite the tragedies of Alison’s life, Fun Home is not a depressing tale. Instead, the brutally honest depiction of coming out as a lesbian in a rural area was the queer musical I did not know I needed. 

PREVIEW - Blithe Spirit at USC

Blithe Spirit by Noël Coward, and directed by Stan Brown, opens this weekend and serves as a close to Theatre South Carolina’s 2015 Mainstage Season. Blithe Spirit serves as the first Coward production at Theatre South Carolina since Present Laughter was staged in February of 2012. Both Blithe Spirit is a lighthearted and farcical comedy that follows author Charles Condomine (Josh Jeffers), who invites a medium, Madame Arcati (Marybeth Gorman), to his house one evening to conduct a séance in order to study her for his next novel. Charles, wholeheartedly believing the medium to be a hoax, is proven very wrong when he finds himself haunted by his first wife, Elvira (Candace Thomas). He is then caught in a supernatural love-triangle between his living wife, Ruth (Nicole Dietze), and the strong-willed Elvira.

Director Stan Brown explains, “I'm intrigued by two questions the play asks. As we move from one relationship to another, what “ghosts” do we take with us? I also believe…as the play implies, that genuine love is eternal.” And despite the show being nearly 75 years old, that is what makes the show still accessible to modern audiences. “Mr. Coward wrote Blithe Spirit in 1941, yet the story deals with what "we" would consider contemporary relationship issues. Its timelessness marks it as a classic”, explains Brown.

Coward originally wrote Blithe Spirit in the midst of World War II as a means of escapism. Audiences could go to the theatre for a few hours and enjoy a few laughs together as a way to temporarily flee the problems facing their lives.  And that is something about theatre that will always be relevant. Whether your problems are large or small, everyone can use a good laugh every once in a while. “…There's no reason why it can't be an escape for us during today's dark realities.  My hope is that our audiences have fun and forget their every day burdens for the two hours they're with us,” Josh Jeffers says, “Stan has encouraged us to play because ‘they're called plays for a reason,’ … It's always fun to see what people bring into rehearsal. We've spent a lot of time laughing.”

So join Theatre South Carolina for a few laughs with its last Mainstage show of the year! Show times for are 8pm, Wednesdays through Saturdays, with additional 3pm matinees on Sunday, November 15and Saturday, November 21.  Tickets for the production are $12 for students, $16 for USC faculty/staff, military personnel and seniors (60+) and $18 for the general public.  Tickets can be purchased in advance by calling 803-777-2551 or by visiting the Longstreet Theatre box office, which is open Monday-Friday, 12:30pm-5:30pm, beginning Friday, November 6.  The Longstreet Theater box office is located at 1300 Greene St.  Drayton Hall Theatre is located at 1214 College St.

-- Rebecca Shrom

For more information about Blithe Spirit or the theatre program at the University of South Carolina, contact Kevin Bush by phone at 803-777-9353 or via email at bushk@mailbox.sc.edu.

A New Era Exploding at Trustus - a review of Ragtime (the Musical) by Jillian Owens

It was the music of something beginning. An era exploding.

A century spinning.

In riches and rags,

And in rhythm and rhyme.

The people called it Ragtime.

Ragtime (the Musical) - based on the E.L. Doctorow novel of the same name - is a story of hope and disillusionment in the face of the American Dream.  This dream is interpreted in many different ways by the many characters in the show, which opened at Trustus Theatre this past weekend.  Ragtime opens during the “Progressive Era” in 1904.  Industry is booming, and excitement is in the air.  This air is filled with the strange, new, simple, and syncopated music of Ragtime.  The music (by Stephen Flaherty) is catchy and tender, simple yet deep, with lyrics by Lynn Ahrens, and book by Terrence McNally.

Mother and Father have a kind, though sterile marriage.  When Father, played by G. Scott Wild, heads off to explore the North Pole with Admiral Peary, Mother - played by Marybeth Gorman - is left to tend to their son, large house, and business affairs.  When she digs up something very unusual in her garden, a chain of events are pushed into movement that will change the lives of her small family, as well as the communities around her.

Ragtime shines thanks to one of the most talented casts it could have possibly pulled together, consisting of many Columbia theatre veterans, as well as a few talented new faces.  There are no weak links in this production.  Terrance Henderson pulls double duty as the charismatic ragtime musician Coalhouse Walker and the show’s choreographer.  Vicky Saye Henderson plays the radical anarchist, Emma Goldman, with gusto, Younger Brother - played by Kevin Bush - is passionate about finding something to be passionate about, and Scott Vaughan’s appearances as Houdini, though short, are very charming.  Chip Stubbs delivers a beautiful standout performance as Tateh, with a voice that conveys all the determination, elation, and heartache of a poor immigrant father struggling to reconcile his dream of America with the reality of his new world.  Stories are intertwined and alliances are made and broken.  With so many characters and stories, you’re bound to find at least a few you can identify with.

If you call the Trustus Box Office hotline, a friendly recording will inform you that this show has over thirty actors in the cast – the most they’ve had onstage at one time.  Upon hearing this, I must admit I was a little worried.  When Trustus tries to put on a large-scale show, it usually ends up being a mixed bag.  Their small stage can only hold so much spectacle, scenery, and cast members before things start to get cramped.

Fortunately, for director Chad Henderson, this particular big show doesn’t require a massive set or much spectacle beyond the talent of its actors.  That’s not to say the set is unimpressive.  Brandon McIver’s construction of his giant Statue of Liberty was well-documented on the Trustus Facebook page in the weeks before the opening.  This, along with fragments of early 1900’s Americana, are evocative of the period and theme.  The orchestra is small but skilled.  The costumes are period-accurate and lovely.

Between Henderson’s (Chad) stage direction and Henderson’s (Terrance) choreography, the actors don’t seem confined or cramped at all.  I would advise you to try to get a seat closer to the back as sight lines are a slight issue.  I can’t help but wonder…Is the success of Ragtime just the beginning of a new era of larger-scale productions for Trustus?  Are we ready for this “new music”?

~ Jillian Owens