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Stahl lined up new financing and waited until Bridgewater was free to take the role. He added multi-media effects with video clips for the flashback scenes. He also revamped the book to enhance the role of the singer's road manager Robert (David Ayers), who in the first act gently but firmly coaxes a reluctant Holiday through a rehearsal for a comeback concert in Britain in 1954. In the second act, he helps a somewhat inebriated Holiday pull through the concert. This time around Bridgewater is confident that she can avoid being possessed by Billie's spirit. "I don't have the same fear that I did before of going to those dark places that I needed to go in order to put the right emotional impact into a particular scene," she said. "I'm very secure with who I am. I'm a totally different woman now... I'm ready to share my body and space with Billie, but I'm not going to allow her to take over." In her singing parts, Bridgewater says she's "trying to stay a little closer to Billie's styling without imitating her," performing arrangements by music director and pianist Bill Jolly that reflect the mid-1950s era. In the rehearsal scenes, she displays a bit more of her own vocal style, engaging in some energetic scat singing in "Them There Eyes," which Holiday rarely did. But in the second act concert, Bridgewater says she goes more into Billie's voice on such numbers as "God Bless the Child" and the more obscure "Violets for Your Furs." Bridgewater says the show's most emotional moments for her come when she performs the anti-lynching song "Strange Fruit" with a sparse chordal piano accompaniment
-- after a monologue about Billie's humiliating experiences touring the segregated South, and "Good Morning, Heartache," where Billie breaks down after recalling how her mother abandoned her as a child. Bridgewater hopes audiences will come away from the show with "a whole new take on Billie" and not see her as some tragic figure. "The show is a celebration of the woman," said Bridgewater. "I want people to go,
'Wow, what an amazing woman, what strength she had to endure all the things that she did before she died.'" ___ Online:
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