Theater review: ‘Lady Day'

That gardenia Billie Holiday famously tucked in her hair wasn’t just a style statement. It originated as a covert coverup. She first wore the flower because she’d burned her ’do with a curling iron.

So we’re told in “Lady Day,” a play with music starring Dee Dee Bridgewater as the much-troubled great jazz singer.

Unfortunately, even a garden full of gardenias wouldn’t mask the clumsiness of Stephen Stahl’s script and direction.

Bridgewater, a Grammy winner who also picked up a Tony for “The Wiz,” has history with the show. It reaches back to the mid-1980s, when she appeared in an earlier version that ran in London.

The play is based on an actual comeback concert and is set in the fall of 1954 — just five years before Holiday’s death at age 44.

Act I finds Holiday in England as part of a European tour. She’s three hours late for rehearsal and her manager frets while four musicians vamp and grouse. Holiday finally arrives and immediately schools the band members in playing from their soul.

Between run-throughs of “A Foggy Day (In London Town),” “All of Me” and, of course, “Strange Fruit,” Holiday explains that her overseas tour is a necessity. She can’t sing in U.S. clubs because she’s lost her cabaret license, due to her drug bust.

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.

Act II takes place during the concert later that night. Holiday is loaded, dropping N-words and setting the audience straight about her life and times. She pulls herself together to sing “God Bless the Child,” “When You’re Smiling,” “Mean to Me” and more standards.

Her final song is “I’m Pulling Through.” It’s a song of optimism and lends a dose of irony and bittersweetness. It’s a smart finish, but it can’t save this “Day.”

jdziemianowicz@nydailynews.com