For the third time this season, Broadway’s Circle in the Square Theater has an opening. After the commercial failures of the musical “Soul Doctor” and the baseball drama “Bronx Bombers”, the venue now hosts “Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill”, featuring five-time Tony winner Audra McDonald as songstress Billie Holiday. The show, which began previews March 25, opened Sunday, April 13, for a limited run of 70 performances.

A notable off-Broadway hit in 1986-87 at the Westside Theater, Lanie Robertson’s play puts Holiday in concert, singing her classics (“Strange Fruit”, “God Bless the Child”) but also recounting her troubled life story. The gig comes at the end of her career, when drug use, legal troubles and cirrhosis were about to take their final toll on her (Holiday died in 1959 at the age of 44).

No stranger to Broadway, actress McDonald has won Tonys for “Carousel”, “Master Class”, “Ragtime”, “A Raisin in the Sun” and the recent “Porgy and Bess” revival. A veteran director, Lonny Price wrote the book for, directed and starred in “A Class Act”.
Early word on McDonald’s performance from bloggers and the like has been stellar, but will the New York critics celebrate Holiday, too?

Variety’s Marilyn Stasio sure does. “There’s an uncanny immediacy to this production,” she writes, and McDonald’s “extraordinary sensitivity as an actor that makes [her] interpretation memorable.” Stasio finds the script a bit “overstuffed,” not to mention “a grueling monologue to sustain for an hour and a half, but McDonald pulls it off with style and grace and a helluva set of lungs.”

Entertainment Weekly critic Thom Geier raves, “McDonald delivers a mesmerizing performance that is not so much an act of mimicry or even impersonation as it is a transformation. A record-breaking sixth Tony Award seems like a foregone conclusion.” He carps that director “Lonny Price, directing with the syncopated pacing of a jazz standard, over-literalizes some of the storytelling with unnecessary projections of key figures from Holiday's life,” but still gives the production an A-minus grade.

Mark Kennedy, of the Associated Press, called the piece “evocative and touching” and “sad without being maudlin.” As for McDonald: “close your eyes and Lady Day is back.”

USA Today’s Elysa Gardner gave the show ***1/2 and compliments McDonald on changing her usually precise phrasing and vibrato to suit Holiday’s different style. “`Lady Day is at its most potent,’ she writes, “when the songs speak for [Holiday]. McDonald delivers a beautifully phrased `God Bless the Child,’ an enchanting `Crazy He Calls Me,’ a chilling `Strange Fruit’.”

In his **** review for the Daily News, Joe Dziemianowicz lauds McDonald’s performance: “This isn’t about mimicry. It’s about the heart and soul, bruised and battered, that comes through. … The final moment — in dead silence — is shattering. Ooh, ooh, ooh, indeed.”

New York Times critic Charles Isherwood has issues with Lanie Robertson’s book which is “frankly, artificial and a bit hoary.” However, “it’s worth putting up with the show’s tackier (and duller) aspects for the pleasure of hearing Ms. McDonald breathe aching life into some of Holiday’s greatest songs… When [McDonald] sings, there appears before us the ghostly image of an artist who could only find equilibrium in her life when she lost herself in her music.”

Giving the show ***, AM New York’s Matt Windman also has book issues but writes, “It's easy to forget that the play is pretty thin thanks to [McDonald’s] transfixing performance.” It also helps that “Circle in the Square, Broadway's in-the-round theater, is an ideal setting for the play.”

It takes Newsday’s Linda Winer a couple of songs to fully get into the show and McDonald’s performance, but eventually “this amazing actress and this jazz icon are indivisible.”

Robert Kahn, of NBC New York, concurs that “McDonald gives another powerful and distinct performance,” though he also appreciates “the patter, chronicling tales from Holiday’s life of evil men and bad breaks.” He adds, “you don’t need a vast familiarity with Billie Holiday to enjoy the show.”

Broadway World’s Michael Dale agrees, noting, “So immediately stunning is the accuracy of [McDonald’s] replication of Holiday's timbre and inflections at that point of her life that many of Thursday night's audience responded with applause a mere eight bars into her opening performance of `I Wonder Where Our Love Has Gone.’ … not only is [McDonald] an entrancing singer, but she's one hell of an actor.”