“Yesterday’s, an evening with Billie Holiday” is intoxicating, transporting

HARTFORD — In life Billie Holiday was only 44 when she from liver disease after years of drinking and drug abuse. At the Hartford Stage company in the third in their summer series, “Yesterday’s, an evening with Billie Holiday,” that sorry tale is brought to life by the mesmerizing jazz singer Vanessa Rubin.
Rubin doesn’t so much impersonate Holiday but embodies her sad yet exuberant personality through music. You would think after two hours you might get tired of hearing Rubin intermingle songs with the story of Holiday’s. Rather, like a friend you haven’t seen in a long time, you just want it to go on all night.
It is almost like being drugged to listen to her sing and talk, and becomes even more intoxicating as the evening progresses.
“Singing is the way I communicate,” she says. “Singing is the way I give of myself.” Some people are good at living life, and some live only on stage. Holiday fell firmly in the second category.
Raped at 10, thrown in a Catholic reform school, hanging with bad guys, becoming addicted to heroin, which filled the hole inside her she said, as sad as it is, isn’t unique. What was different was her determination and ambition to succeed as best she could despite these tragically difficult odds.
In the south in the 1930s through the 1950s blacks were treated badly frequently, not allowed to eat with her fellow white performers and worse, of which she bravely sang about in the famous and still shocking song “Strange Fruit” about black men being lynched.
The show is set on the last night of her last concert in May 1959. She died three months later. We learn that she was born Eleanora Fagan and changed her name to Billie Holiday after her father Clarence Holiday who had married her mother, Sadie, but abandoned them when she was young.
Throughout the show, which is set up like a cabaret with tables and chairs that the stage usually occupies, Rubin’s Holiday interacts a bit with the audience, but also with her fine fellow band mates, Levi Barcourt, at Hart graduate, on piano, Bernard Davis on drums, and David Jackson on bass.
Jackson doesn’t say much, while Davis sings one song, and is a surprisingly natural actor and swell drummer. Barcourt, who also is the show’s music director, has a swinging swagger about him, but really is a far better musician than he is an actor.
At one point she says, “When people applaud it is the only time I feel really loved.” It teeters on the edge of maudlin self-pity, but her feisty determination, and charisma somehow keeps her from being an object of derision and scorn, but instead, she comes across as an honest black woman doing the best she could in her time and place.
“I could only sing the way I feel,” she says, and often changed the songs others wrote to suit her, or she wrote them herself. Songs like the terrific “Good Morning Heartache,” “God Bless the Child,” “You’ve Changed,” and “Moonlight,” plus others, filled the air. In one of the many songs she sang “love lives in a lonely land, where there’s not helping hand, to understand.”
There is something oddly heartening about these terribly sad songs. For Holiday fans, it’s fun to find out how many of them sound familiar, but even if you don’t know her music, you’ll enjoy it.
One that she didn’t sing, “Glad to be Unhappy,” always reminds me of Holiday when she says, “unrequited loves a bore, and I’ve got it pretty bad. But for someone you adore, it’s a pleasure to be sad.”
Nothing about Rubin’s Holiday, or this show, is boring, however. In fact, it’s quite the opposite.

YESTERDAYS, AN EVENING WITH BILLIE HOLIDAY

3 stars
Location: Hartford Stage Company, 50 Church Street, Hartford.
Production: Written by Reenie Upchurch. Directed by Woodie King Jr. Music director and pianist Levi Barcourt. Lighting design by Antoinette Tynes.
Running time: 2 hours plus one 15-minute intermission.
Show Times: Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays at 7:30 p.m., Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m., with matinee performances Wednesdays, Saturdays, and Sundays at 2 p.m. through August 22.
Tickets: $26 — $65. Call 527-5151 or visit their Web site at hartfordstage.org.
ACTOR…CHARACTER
Vanessa Rubin … Billie Holiday
Levi Barcourt … pianist
Bernard Davis … drummer and vocalist
David Jackson … bassist