Philly jazz singer Laurin Talese makes her acting debut playing Billie Holiday in a one-woman show

Laurin Talese is Billie Holiday in Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill, the Philadelphia Theatre Company production of Lanie Robertson’s play at the Suzanne Roberts Theatre. How much acting experience did she have?

“Zero,” says Talese. “This is 100% my dramatic debut.”

The Cleveland-born, classically trained jazz singer has been a Philadelphian since coming to study at the University of the Arts.

Talese, 40, has made a name for herself as an elegantly accomplished vocalist. Her debut album, Gorgeous Chaos, came out in 2016. She won the Sarah Vaughan International Jazz Vocal Competition in 2020, and has an album of original songs — Museum of Living Stories on the way — and another which will be sung in Portuguese.

» READ MORE: A long-shuttered jazz bar frequented by Billie Holiday comes to life at the Suzanne Roberts Theatre

Lady Day, through April 30, is performed in an immersive environment done up to look like Emerson’s, the jazz bar at 15th and Bainbridge where Holiday played in 1959, four months before her death.

The faux jazz club on stage is just around the corner from the blue historical marker on Lombard Street, outside the building that formerly housed the Showboat, a venue where Holiday frequently performed, and the Douglass Hotel, where she stayed while in town.

Talese was approached by the PTC and its director in residence, Jeffrey L. Page, in January.

“At first I was like, ‘You know I never acted before, right?’” she says, speaking from her home in Mount Airy, on a morning before a Lady Day performance. “But folks who’ve seen my shows know that I’m a storyteller. So they may have seen something in me that I didn’t even see in myself. Which was that I’m able to be a vessel for a story, even if it’s not my own.”

She read for the audition and sang “God Bless The Child,” the sorrowful masterpiece written by Holiday with Arthur Herzog Jr. in 1939 that’s a centerpiece of the show.

“It’s ended up being one of the most rewarding things I’ve ever done,” Talese says. ”Not only is it my theatrical debut,” she said, “But it’s a one-woman show with several monologues and 14 songs I’ve never sung before.”

In Lady Day, Talese wears a white off-the-shoulder gown and intermittently wears the singer’s trademark gardenia in her hair. She’s joined on stage by Will Brock, who plays pianist Jimmy Powers.

Born Eleanora Fagan in Philadelphia, Holiday grew up in Baltimore. In Lady Day, Talese as Holiday leaves the audience stunned, when she calls waking up next to her grandmother lying dead beside her when she was 8, and then being raped when she was 10, “Almost the worst things that ever happened to me.”

Talese walks among Lady Day audiences as Holiday, drinking heavily, telling her life story. That tale involves plenty of trouble in Philadelphia, including being arrested along with her husband on a narcotics charge in 1956.

The singer voices her disdain for the city in a line that gets a big laugh. “Philly’s always been the rat’s ass for me. When I die, I don’t care if I go to heaven or hell, long’s it ain’t in Philly.”

Memorizing her lines was hard, but mingling with the crowd not so different than a normal gig for Talese. She didn’t know, however, the man whose table she repeatedly stopped beside on opening night was Robertson.

After the performance, she met the playwright whose Lady Day was first performed in 1986 and has been produced scores of times, including a Tony-winning performance by Audra MacDonald in 2014. “It was great,” she said. “He loved it.”

Talese grew up listening to her father’s record collection, and as a student at the Cleveland School of the Arts, got serious about jazz singing after hearing Sarah Vaughan and Lambert, Hendricks & Ross.

Only later did Talese — a Black Music City grant winner in 2022 — come to fully appreciate Holiday’s emotional mastery.

“You get to the point where you have experience in life and realize it’s not perfection that makes music great,” she says. “And to be honest, it took me while, into my 20s and even 30s, to realize that.”

Holiday’s “sense of rhythm is ridiculous,” she says. “She just glides, and floats. She’s always spot on. Sometimes she’s a horn player, sometimes she’s like a gritty tenor sax, sometimes she’s bright and buoyant like a trumpet. Her emotion is so raw. And there’s been no one since then to possess all those things in one person.”

But Talese doesn’t try to sound like Holiday. “When mimicry is attempted, that detracts from the art,” she says. “That was really stressed by our director … He liked what he saw of me and my work, and he wanted to bring me through — and honor Billie.”

The key to telling Holiday’s story was to focus on her humanity, Talese says. “This was a woman who was able to transcend a lot of trauma and unsavory business … and somehow become a seminal figure in jazz, at a time when women weren’t even considered musicians. That’s the crux of the story to me. It’s a story of triumph and tragedy. It really makes you revere life.”

“Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill” at the Suzanne Roberts Theatre, 480 S. Broad St., runs through April 30. $10-$84. PhiladelphiaTheatreCompany.org.