Lady Day at Emerson's Bar & Grill

Filmed stage show is a first-rate presentation of McDonald's painful tour-de-force evocation of Billie Holiday's sad decline. Attempts to portray Holiday's experiences in context of the greater story of race relations in America is only intermittently successful, due to time constraints, which occasionally makes the drama seem a little forced and oppressive. Still a valuable record of McDonald's stunning performance, which must have been scalding to witness first hand.