The New York Times - Recommended
"..."Lady Day, which opened on Thursday night at the Little Shubert Theater, tries to straddle the divide between a true biographical drama and a nostalgic you-are-there concert. But like the vulgar Judy Garland bio-play End of the Rainbow, this show ends up cheapening the image of the artist it means to pay loving homage to. The book, by Stephen Stahl, who also directed, rehashes the frequent low points of Holiday's life with no great delicacy or insight, despite Ms. Bridgewater's committed and convincing performance."
NY Daily News - Not Recommended
"...When Holiday is performing, Lady Day works well enough. Bridgewater conveys some of Holiday's magic. But when Holiday speaks, things often go south. As she flashes back to Holiday's past, Bridgewater talks in a distracting and cloying widdle-girl voice. Even worse is the decision to have Bridgewater mime Holiday's adolescent rape and her introduction to heroin. Scenes that should be harrowing lose any and all heft."
Hollywood Reporter - Recommended
"...Bridgewater, who won a 2011 Grammy for her Holiday tribute album, beautifully manages the delicate balancing act between delivering an outright impression of the singer and infusing the material with her own style. She expertly suggests Holiday's trademark husky vocals and occasional slurred diction, while at the same time providing swinging, jazzy intonations that are very much her own. It's a bravura performance, both musically and dramatically, made more impressive by the fact that she's convincingly playing a character nearly a quarter-century younger. But it's stuck in a hopelessly stilted and contrived vehicle that pales in comparison to such previous dramatic treatments of the singer as the film Lady Sings the Blues and the oft-produced stage musical Lady Day at Emerson's Bar and Grill."
NY1 - Recommended
"...The setting is not terribly imaginative. It's 1954. Holiday is in London for a concert at the end of a European tour. She's barred from performing in the States following a drug conviction and there's a lot at stake here because she's hoping to be able to return home. Of course, she's plagued by the usual demons " drugs, booze and insecurity. And every so often, the lights dim and she relives a sad or tragic moment in her life. Bridgewater is an excellent actress, but even she seems to struggle a bit with all the clunky exposition. The singing, however, is another story. Bridgewater is vocally masterful. That halting vibrato and plaintive urgency is pure Holiday. And she adds a raw honesty that suggests a life dominated by supreme highs and lows."
Bloomberg - Not Recommended
"...And so Bridgewater must enact the physical and sexual abuses of the singer's childhood, her first experience with heroin, etc. I can only imagine it's as excruciating to perform such necrophiliac acts as it is to watch them. Thrilling as it is, the music in the end neither justifies nor suffices."
New York Post - Recommended
"...Book writer Stephen Stahl also directed the show, meaning there was nobody to tell him the part of the hunky assistant stage manager (Rafael Poueriet) is unnecessary. Or that Holiday's supportive manager, Robert (David Ayers), is dull as dishwater. Worse are the factual mistakes and clunky flashbacks in which Holiday puts on a little girl's voice to recall being raped as a child and growing up in a brothel, with blues songs wafting in. I don't want no money, Lil' Billie cries, just let me listen to that beautiful, sweet whorehouse music, please! "
Entertainment Weekly - Recommended
"...One remarkable thing about Dee Dee Bridgewater's portrayal of Billie Holiday in the Off Broadway musical Lady Day has nothing to do with how she performs that wonderful catalog (wonderfully) or delivers Holiday's between-song straight talk (so straight it is razor sharp). It's her laugh, a cackle that sounds utterly genuine and completely divided between Holiday's satisfaction with her own stories, and a sort of bitter amusement at all the compromises that allowed her to tell them."
Bergen Record - Recommended
"..."Lady Day" is enhanced by an excellent quartet, led by Bill Jolly, but the show is overloaded with Holiday's personal travails. Stahl's writing is awkward and melodramatic, and his staging including his direction of Bridgewater is unimaginative and poorly paced. Billie Holiday was an immortal jazz singer, and Bridgewater captures her style and sound very well. With more singing and much less talking, "Lady Day" might have been a fine evening of entertainment."
Time Out New York - Somewhat Recommended
"...While her voice is beltier and less affecting than Holiday's, Dee Dee Bridgewater has meaty jazz chops and adeptly delivers more than two dozen brief selections from Holiday's songbook; but she can't save the rest of Stahl's play from its morass of melodrama, exposition and lazy misinformation (as when Holiday recalls hearing Louis Armstrong playin' that bebop in 1925 years before the advent of bebop, a style that Armstrong loathed). Someone please put Bridgewater and these evocative songs in a club, where they belong."
Talkin Broadway - Not Recommended
"...You might expect the listless "overture" ("Rhythm Is Our Business") or lamentable line readings from the band members (Bill Jolly, James Cammack, Jerome Jennings, Neil Johnson, who sizzle when they keep their mouths shut), as these are fairly common features of the genre. But if Stahl's languid book (a sample, from the end of Act I: "Billie, you can find out where you are today by knowing where you've been. You got to start accepting the good with the bad. That's what makes us who we are") represents nearly 30 years of refinement, and his poorly paced, barely-there staging (on a distractingly empty set by Beowulf Boritt) the culmination of his vision, one suspects something is amiss in the conception. Worse yet, these qualities sap the spark from the only things that have a prayer of elevating the evening: the songs and Bridgewater."
TheaterMania - Recommended
"...Of course, it would be inauthentic to whitewash the troubling aspects of Holiday's life: her childhood rape, her work as a prostitute, her lifelong addiction to heroin. Stahl rightfully intersperses these ugly truths between Holiday's beautiful and soulful songs. The first and second acts offer a lesson in contrasts, however: There is an effective way to do that and a less-effective way. This stellar ensemble, as led by a genuine star, deserves the former."