First Ladies of Jazz

 Over at Contemporary Theatre of Dallas, Denise Lee is playing a Billie Holiday in much worse shape than Butler's Ella Fitzgerald. Writer Lanie Robertson's Lady Day at Emerson's Bar and Grill finds the singer on the downside of stardom and just months from death. It's 1959, and because she's done eight months of prison time for a felony narcotics rap, a broke and broken Holiday has been barred from the swank Manhattan clubs where she reigned in the 1940s and '50s.

 Reduced to singing for drinks and tips, she's been booked into Emerson's, a smoky Philadelphia dive. Offstage she's heard saying "I can't go on," and she wanders out through the audience—arranged around candlelit café tables at CTD—before climbing the steps to the microphone in front of her trio (conductor-pianist Joe Rogers, drummer Charles E. Dunlap and bassist Chris White).

 DTC's Ella re-creates a smart, polished concert in a 1,000-seat venue. On designer Wade Giampa's dingy, brick-walled set at CTD, Lady Day (directed by Phyllis Cicero) plunges the audience into a murky juke-joint where it hurts to see the star slumming. The atmospheres of these shows are as different as the stars' temperaments.

 What the productions have in common is the fine work of their leads. As Billie Holiday, Lee, a longtime fave on musical theater and cabaret stages in Dallas, doesn't have to attempt a spot-on impression to get the job done. She has a voice you could warm your hands on, whether singing as herself or in character. It's a stretch to accept her as the strung-out Holiday, even with the gardenia in her slicked-back hair. She's too robust to be a junkie. But toward the midpoint of the two-hour show, she clicks directly into the essence of Holiday.

 It happens as she eases into one of Billie Holiday's best-known songs, the haunting "Strange Fruit," from the poem by Abel Meeropol about lynching in the South. Here Lee gets closest to Holiday's sound, her own clear, rich voice giving way to Holiday's ragged rasp. She teases the tempo the way Holiday did and curls up, over and around the notes.

 From that point on, Lee is Lady Day. In the second act, she slurs and wobbles—which makes the music even sadder—as if she'd gone backstage at intermission to shoot up in utter despair. As the lights go down, we see Billie Holiday silently mouthing words, already a ghostly figure.

 See these shows for the music, for the soulful singing and acting, to be reminded who Ella and Lady Day were and why they were loved. It's a strange but happy coincidence that for a few weeks in February we can be right there with them as the ladies sing the blues.