LADY DAY AT EMERSON’S BAR & GRILL, Fleetwood-Jourdain Theatre. It takes guts for off-Loop actor Nambi E. Kelley to take on this play about Billie Holiday so soon after Eartha Kitt’s incandescent performance of the same work last spring; at least give Kelley and director Phillip Edward VanLear credit for tackling the challenge. Playwright Lanie Robertson’s near soliloquy, set in a seedy Philadelphia nightclub a few months before Holiday’s 1959 death, takes the form of a concert the burned-out, strung out Holiday interrupts with woozy, sometimes humorous, often bitter reminiscences of her struggles with poverty, racism, heroin, and loving the wrong men. Kelley, a solid actor but obviously too young for the role, evokes Holiday’s distinctive, tune-bending vocal style but tends to rush her speeches, missing the stream-of-consciousness effect needed to make the scattershot anecdotes accumulate into a credible and moving portrait.
