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The news today of Eartha Kitt’s death brought to mind her brilliant performance here in Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill, the monodrama-with-music about jazz great Billie Holiday. Performing at the Athenaeum Theatre in 1996, Kitt made no attempt to duplicate Holiday’s fluid vocal style, which was very different from her own throaty, vibrato-filled growl. Instead, she completely inhabited the role on her own terms, melding her distinctive personality and powerful stage presence with Holiday’s tragic story and putting a new spin on such Holiday standards as “Strange Fruit.” By not trying to impersonate Holiday, I wrote at the time, “Kitt draws on her own troubled career as an outspoken, temperamental African-American woman artist to give a performance of unapproachable authority. The result is not only riveting drama; it’s an experience of spellbinding, almost ritual intensity.”
