Few performers ever live up to their legend, but Billie Holiday, the singer who died tragically over 50 years ago, was one who absolutely did.

Her legend – and her life – were as singer and sinner. 

All of it is on parade at "Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill," the season-opening show for the Milwaukee Rep that kicked off Sunday night at the Stackner Cabaret.

Holiday was a singer of magnificent uniqueness. Her voice, neither strong or broad, was like a knife that cut to the quick. She roamed over, under, around and through a song, letting it wrap you up when you were listening.

As a performer, she was demanding, calling for quiet from an audience and requiring a narrow spotlight so she couldn’t see anyone in the audience. She traveled through the world of racial hatred with white musicians in the Artie Shaw band, players who supported her through every indignity.

While her star shone – making money, spreading great music and performing at Carnegie Hall – her personal life shimmered and then shattered, caught in a web of alcohol and heroin that would eventually be her undoing.

There is an endless supply of stories about the dysfunctional superstar, musician, actor, athlete. The stories are all sad, and they are all the same in the end – the tremendous waste of a huge talent, wracked by substance abuse.

The Rep production is set in the Philadelphia club, Emerson’s, and it’s a gig in late 1959, just months before Holiday died. Philadelphia is where she was arrested and imprisoned for drug possession, and it is not her favorite city on earth.

"I always tell people that when I die, I don’t care if I go to heaven or hell, just don’t send me to Philly," Holiday tells the crowd in the club.

Alexis J. Roston plays Holiday, and Abdul Hamid Royal is her loyal piano accompanist, Jimmy Powers.

We are treated to 15 songs, ranging from the famed "God Bless the Child," which Holiday wrote for her mother, to the protest song "Strange Fruit." 

Roston is an absolute power as Holiday. Dressed in white with long white gloves, her very first moments capture all of the complications and sorrows that were Billie Holiday. The opening song is the plaintive "Wonder Where Our Love Has Gone:"

All I know is that I'm in love with you
Even though you say that we are through
I know without your love I just can’t go on
I wonder where our love has gone

Always thought you'd love me more and more
Never dreamed you'd ever let me go
I know without your love I just can't go on
I wonder where our love has gone

The music in the production is outstanding, but the story seems to bog down into a routine that offers no surprise. Sing a song, tell a story, sing a song, tell a story. Holiday starts out sober and ends up unable to even stand to sing the final song.

The whole thing takes just over two hours, but it may well have been a better evening cutting some of the stories about the travails of her life and letting the music tell the story. The whole thing just seemed to ring with a false note, wondering whether a Holiday gig in a club would include these long and detailed soul searching revelations.

It was as if Lanie Robertson, who wrote the show, wandered from the path of the story he wanted to tell.

As Roston says early in the show, "Singing has always been the best part of living to me."

The story of Billie Holiday is, above all, the story of a woman and her music and more of that story and less of the repetition of stories too often told.

"Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill" runs through Oct. 30 and information on showtimes and tickets is available here.

Production Credits: Director, Leda Hoffmann; Music Director, Abdul Hamid royal; Scenic Designer, J. Michael Griggs; Costume Designer, Jason Orlenko; Lighting Designer, Christine Binder; Sound Designer, Victoria Delorio; Stage Manager, Anthony Poston.