Playbill’s Harry Haun on Steven’s New Plays…
“ANOTHER DAY, ANOTHER DOLLAR: While Audra McDonald ravishingly goes to Tony-winning rack and ruin uptown at Circle in the Square in Lady Day at Emerson's Bar and Grill (through Oct. 5), 14 blocks south at the Dorothy Strelsin Theatre, Susanne Froix makes exactly the same descent — without music — in Shades of Blue.
This account of the sad, frazzled end of Billie Holiday, according to writer-director Steven Carl McCasland, was inspired by two letters that are used verbatim in the play: one written by her hard-driving manager, Joe Glaser, after her death and the other written by Billie herself to Tallulah Bankhead, presented here as her last love.
Shades of Blue runs in rep through Sept. 6 with What Was Lost, McCasland's depiction of Laurette Taylor's difficult stage comeback in The Glass Menagerie…”
