Audra McDonald is unmistakably Billie Holiday

It was Audra McDonald’s face but Billie Holiday’s voice. To hear her speak and sing with the trademark voice of Lady Day was a beautiful surprise. I didn’t expect her to take possession of one of my most favorite singers but indeed she did.

On a pretend stage, hers was the sound of the woman who put so much pain and suffering in her songs. “She … sounds … just … like … Billie … Holiday” kept reverberating in my head. It was uncanny but spoke to the talented actress that she is.

McDonald, who channeled Billie Holiday in “Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill,” won a Tony Award Sunday night for her performance in the play, which runs until August 10 at Circle in the Square theater in New York. I drove to the city a week ago with some friends to see her, and the actress was in good form, just as I’d seen her two years ago in “The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess” and other shows.

She won her sixth Tony, topping the most ever received by actresses Julie Harris and Angela Lansbury. She already has Tonys for best featured actress in a play (“A Raisin in the Sun” and “Master Class”), best lead actress in a musical (“The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess”) and best featured actress in a musical (“Ragtime” and “Carousel”).

McDonald wept openly when she won the “lead actress in a play” award, paying homage to African American women like Holiday who had it hard themselves but made it easier for her. Some of those women – including Dorothy Dandridge – were forced to lead tragic lives at a time when their worth was questioned and talent denied, and they took that psychosis out on themselves.

“I want to thank all the strong and brave and courageous women whose shoulders I am standing on,” McDonald said. “And most of all Billie Holiday. You deserve so much more than you were given when you were on this Earth.”

McDonald is one year younger than Holiday when she died at age 44 in 1959.

The play was written by Lanie Robertson in 1984 and takes place in a small bar on the northeast corner of 15th and Bainbridge Streets in South Philadelphia. A 2003 article in the Philadelphia Inquirer mentioned that over the last two decades it was a seedy jazz bar. It no longer exists.

Interestingly, the bar was in the same block as the Hotel Brotherhood of America, a benevolent society of African American hotel workers that built a headquarters on the street in 1906. The organization has been around since the late 19th century.

Robertson wrote the play after a friend told him about seeing Holiday at Emerson’s Bar and Grill in 1958. “There were six or seven other people in the place,” he said, recalling the conversation in a 1988 interview in The Inquirer. “On the piano was a big glass of liquor, which she never touched. She came in, stumbled over the microphone cord and she sang. She sang for over an hour and stumbled out. She was higher than a kite. He told me many times about her performance in enough detail that I had this very potent theater image.”

The play has been making the rounds of regional theaters since the 1980s. It weaved together the story of her upbringing, her mother Duchess, her drug convictions and the debilitating effects of racism on her life, among other things.

McDonald’s Holiday does not treat Philadelphia kindly, because it was here that the singer was arrested and convicted twice on drug-possession charges. “I been arrested all over the country but Philly’s the only place ever made me a candidate for federal housing,” a 1992 Inquirer story quoted Holiday in a regional performance of the play.

The real singer was busted in 1947 for the first time. She was in her prime – not the “Lady Yesterday” she says in the play that some had started to call her in her declining years. She had made movies, performed with some of the best bands in the business and had lots of records. She was so hot, she was sizzling; she was also shooting heroin into her veins and drinking too much. She was performing at the Earle Theater with the Louis Armstrong band – where she sang among other things the anti-lynching song “Strange Fruit,” a popular political song – when she was busted. She was on stage when she learned that narcotic agents were raiding her room, so she hopped in a car and drove to New York.

The authorities retrieved her and brought her back. She pleaded guilty to possession, and was placed in a women’s detention center in West Virginia. She was imprisoned for a year and a day.

She was arrested again in 1956, pleaded guilty and got probation. Holiday was under arrest in her hospital bed on drug charges in New York when she died.

Those felony convictions allowed her to sing at Carnegie Hall but not at New York nightclubs. So she ended up in small bars like Emerson’s. By 1959, her drinking and drugging had taken a toll, as evidenced by the McDonald’s Holiday in the play. The late Harold McKinney, who played the pianist in some of the early regional versions of the play, recalled seeing the real Holiday perform in Atlanta in 1959. He was playing with the Louis Smith group that was opening for her.

“I remember especially her singing on ‘Fine and Mellow,'” he said. “Her musicians were sizzling, but she was floating right on top of it – like you sometimes see a bit of matter riding on the surface of boiling water – independently of the beat. I sat there enthralled. Her genius was to talk-sing in a way that erased the line between the two, and the purest emotion of the speech came through as music. She hooked you up directly to the basic her.”

That’s exactly what McDonald captured in becoming Billie Holiday in the Circle theater performance.