Billie Holiday wanted her voice to sound like the “big feeling” Louis Armstrong breathed into his horn. When she first recorded Strange Fruit in 1939 – a song written for her about black lynchings, which became a protest anthem – her producer Milt Gabler later recalled that she “attacked the words and could swing like a trumpet player”.
In a warehouse in Adelaide, South Australia, the actor Zahra Newman has mastered an uncanny approximation of that untrained but iconic voice in preparation for her role in Lanie Robertson’s 1986 cabaret Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill.
Set in a Philadelphia nightclub in 1959 during the last months of Holiday’s life, the jazz singer reminisces on a career that disastrously derailed when she was busted for drug possession in the 1940s but rose triumphant again with her final Carnegie Hall concerts in 1956, even with a voice roughened by addiction. This new immersive production will premiere later this month in Adelaide before touring to Sydney and Melbourne.
Its star has her own impressive performance history: Newman has gained acclaim on stage recently as Nabulungi in the Australian production of The Book of Mormon; as Rose Maxson in the Australian debut of August Wilson’s Fences; and as multiple characters in a one-woman adaptation of Kenneth Cook’s gothic outback novel Wake in Fright, for which Guardian Australia described her as one of the country’s “most remarkable actors”.
Newman studied many hours of Holiday’s filmed lived concerts and read in depth about her, concluding the artist saw herself as anything but a victim. “She was like, ‘Why? Why can’t I play, and do everything all the boys do?’”
In a grey windcheater, black pants and silver strap shoes, Newman languidly paces the rehearsal room, singing to her director, Mitchell Butel, at one of nine tables decorated with a tasselled lamp. “Singin’s always been the best part of livin’ for me,” she says, joyously echoing Holiday’s husky phrasing. She leans on the piano and gives a sauced, staccato laugh. Later, she recounts a fight with Holiday’s mother, Sadie, over money for “a little moonlight” (heroin), which inspired Holiday to write God Bless the Child. “Mama may have, papa may have,” Newman sings, evidently feeling the song as her torso sways and her hands make tiny gestures.
Upstairs during a break, the 37-year-old Jamaican-born performer says she is wary of delivering a mere impersonation. Holiday wrote in her 1956 autobiography Lady Sings the Blues, co-authored with journalist William Dufty, that “the whole basis of my singing is feeling” – but warned that copying a style negated such feeling: “Everybody’s got to be different.”
“My profession is not a mimic,” Newman says. “I’m an actor … it’s about evoking her sound and phrasing, so people get the feeling like when they listen to her.” Evidently drawing from Holiday’s punchy autobiography, Robertson’s script has the singer dissing her pianist, swearing and disappearing off stage to get a heroin fix. But Newman ponders how much of this private self Holiday would have revealed on stage. “Would she actually be that crazy and foul-mouthed in front of an audience?” Newman asks. “Maybe, but we don’t know, necessarily.”
It has been 64 years since Holiday died from cirrhosis at age 44, but the singer’s experiences of Jim Crow America – of being forced to use back entrances to venues where she would perform, of being refused admission to bathrooms, of being sent to jail – still resonates today, and not just in the US, where Holiday’s father, Clarence, dying of pneumonia, was refused admittance to various hospitals because of the colour of his skin.
“There’s a disparity globally between descendants of people who were enslaved and descendants of people who were enslavers,” says Newman. Healthcare is one of them. “I think you could talk to a lot of Indigenous Australians about the way they experience healthcare in this country; not being believed when you have pain, so you mistrust all that sort of stuff.”
Newman is halfway through completing a master’s degree in international relations and political science at the University of New South Wales. “For a long time, I wanted to be a lawyer and I really like argument, I really like discourse,” she says. “I like trying to figure out ideas.”
“She is fiercely intelligent and a ferocious researcher,” says director Butel, and there is a “real psychic connection between her and Billie”. Newman has long been a fan, and bought a copy of Holiday’s autobiography when she was younger. “I loved her voice,” she says, “and I’ve certainly learned a bit more about her now.”
Butel first saw Newman perform in the musical comedy the Drowsy Chaperone in Melbourne in 2010. “I went, oh my God, and had a programming moment: who is that person?” They were cast together in Simon Stone’s 2014 production of The Government Inspector and started talking about doing Lady Day a few years ago.
“We talk about how ‘our Billie’ for the show is not necessarily ‘the Billie’, but as Billie says in the show, she’s an emblem of ‘longin’, walkin’ round on two legs’,” Butel says.
“I think that desire to perform and also to show audiences the balance between transcendence and pain is very much in Zahra’s work too.”
Newman grew up in Jamaica immersed in a community-driven culture of storytelling, folk tales and poetry, often performed in a patois that amalgamated West African languages with English. She and her Irish-born mother, a teacher, left Kingston on Christmas Day in 2000 for their new lives in Australia – her mother had enrolled in a PhD and they had family here.
They spent their first two years in Brisbane, where Newman suffered a “culture shock” and had “teachers at high school tell me to go back to wherever I came from”, she says. She oscillated between thinking her new country was “great” with its modern conveniences – “hot water just out of the tap” – and “terrible”, as in: “I fuckin’ hate this place.”
Naturally, Newman had arrived with a Jamaican accent – “a totally different sound”, she says, which is today reserved for friends and family. She quickly learned to speak with a North American-style tone. “[I wanted people to] listen to what I was saying as opposed to how I was saying it,” she says.
Newman moved to Toowoomba, where she spent two years studying acting. While she made “great friendships” there, she found Toowoomba “culturally bereft”, she laughs; she would later draw on her experiences of Australian culture in 2019’s Wake in Fright. From Toowoomba, Newman moved to Melbourne and enrolled in the acting course at the Victorian College of the Arts, beginning again at first year – determined to be “100 times better than everybody else”.
“I was the only non-white person in my class, and I did not want at any point for there to be even the inkling or suggestion that I was there for some other reason apart from my capacity,” she says with a laugh. “I had to be better than the best white person.”
Today, Newman has welcomed more racially diverse casting in theatre – but her experience as the only non-white person in many rehearsal rooms has given her an affinity with Holiday to draw from in this role.
“I mean it was much more pronounced in her era; she’s also operating in a state-based system that facilitates those things. But also, a lot of the audiences that she performed to were white and she was on stage with a bunch of white guys, she played a lot with white bands, and travelled through the south performing for white audiences.
“So I can understand to some extent what it is to be in a space where you’re constantly having to move into everybody else’s perception of the world.”
Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill is at the Adelaide Festival Centre from 25 August to 9 September; Sydney’s Belvoir Street theatre from 14 September to 15 October; and Arts Centre Melbourne from 19 October to 2 December
