‘Lady Day’ and Music at the Odyssey

Don’t be confused: The “Lady Day” that’s opening this weekend at the Odyssey Theatre has nothing to do with Lainie Robertson’s “Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill,” the Billie Holiday concert/drama that had a short run at the Hollywood Playhouse in 1987.

“You haven’t seen this show,” explained writer-director Stephen Stahl, who bought the right to Holiday’s life from her estate. He notes that he wrote his piece in 1981; Robertson followed in 1983--and debuted his “Lady Day” around the United States, while Stahl and his star Dee Dee Bridgewater were playing to enthusiastic houses in Paris and London.

The format for both shows (the singer jamming with her band and speaking with the audience) is based on an actual 1953 Holiday “comeback” concert in London.

“But the look, feel, and what our show has to say are very different,” Stahl stressed. He believes his script (“based on the facts of her life; I didn’t take much dramatic license”) presents Holiday “as a warmer, more loving character. She just kept giving and giving love--and never getting any back. In the show, she falls apart a little bit up there, but she pulls it together. I don’t dwell on the dark side, the drugs. This is about Billie Holiday and her music--the music that kept her alive to (age) 44.”

Rena Scott stars.

BACK TO THE BOARDS: It’s back to Angst for Cynthia Gibb, who’s tackling the demanding role of Chrissy in David Rabe’s “In the Boom Boom Room,” opening this weekend at the Attic Theatre.

“The character is in the process of losing her mind,” explained the actress. “She’s insecure, frightened and struggling to find herself, validate and understand her existence. When we meet her, she’s working in Philadelphia as a go-go dancer, trying to get a career started as a dancer, trying to find love and friendship. But everything she does is to please other people, (to) conform to their expectations.”

In that respect, the role bears more than a passing resemblance to Gibb’s last outing, playing the title character in the recent TV movie “The Karen Carpenter Story.”

“I found a lot of similarities,” she said. “But Karen was never as extreme as Chrissy is. This is a very dark piece. It’s been known to come home with me. It’s emotionally bracing, too--and a good opportunity for me to spend time in (a small theater), test my skills . . . without 10 million people watching.”

HAPPY TRAILS: Buoyed by great press and word-of-mouth, Victoria Hartman and Patrick Mainello’s “Monsoon Christmas” has transferred to the Whitefire Theatre in Sherman Oaks--and, come May, expects to move East for an Equity run. Co-producers Obie Bailey (“My One and Only”) and Jay Cardwell (“Nunsense”) are currently checking out spaces in New York--as well as the possibility of a tryout run at Washington’s Arena Stage or Kennedy Center.

CRITICAL CROSS FIRE: Eduardo Machado’s “A Burning Beach,” a family drama set in 1895 Cuba, recently opened at the Los Angeles Theatre Center. Bill Bushnell and Jose Luis Valenzuela direct.

Said Dan Sullivan in The Times: “The production emphasizes visuals so strongly that one suspects a certain lack of confidence in the text . . . This is a play that needs momentum, not pageantry.”

From Richard Stayton in the Herald Examiner: “A search for the redeemable, while admirable, is in this circumstance a long haul. However, LATC’s obdurate refusal to learn from past mistakes has led once again to a tame, old--if perverse--’puro novela.’ ”

In the Daily News, Tom Jacobs wrote: “(Machado’s) characters are one-dimensional and basically unsympathetic. His plot is totally unfocused. His language is only sporadically interesting. And the production’s imagery, while occasionally striking, isn’t good enough to hold our attention for 2 1/2 hours.”

From the L.A. Reader’s Alison Sloane: “The show forsakes its integrity when its many levels of interaction are ignored. While the acting is adequate and often effective, the show is directed at such a feverishly intense pace that real moments of conflict lose their impact. Subtlety is repressed and melodrama reigns.”

From Tim Gray in Daily Variety: “There are plenty of interesting ideas and good intentions smoldering in ‘A Burning Beach,’ but none of them ever catches fire. It all may have sounded good on paper, but major rewrites are needed; (the) play seems like a blueprint for a finished work.”

Drama-Logue’s T. H. McCulloh found “the play’s interior strength sapped by its simplistic symbolism and its open-faced pamphleteering. Where subtlety would make the piece seductive, Machado opts for broad strokes; where shades of gray would entice the intellect, he sees only black and white.”