Counter Culture

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⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Some Fringe shows just entertain, and then there are shows that educate while they entertain, pulling you into a world you thought you already understood.  Musical Soulmates: Songs of Billie Holiday and Lester Young sits firmly in the latter category. It’s not simply a tribute to Billie Holiday and Lester Young; it’s a guided excavation of their lives, their music, and the brutal social machinery that shaped both. 

Christine Adams anchors the evening with soul‑stirring vocals—rich, grainy, emotionally alert. She wisely avoids imitation. There’s no attempt to mimic Holiday’s timbre or phrasing; instead, she leans into tonal homage, letting the ache behind the songs rise naturally. Adams understands Holiday’s sly humour, her armour of wit, her habit of letting pain sit quietly in the corner until it couldn’t be ignored. Songs like God Bless the Child aren’t just performed—they’re contextualised, illuminated, allowed to breathe.

One of the pleasures of the evening was the mix of familiar and unfamiliar material. There were plenty of songs I hadn’t heard before but liked immediately — including A Sailboat in the Moonlight, a gently romantic 1937 number Holiday made her own. It drifts along on the fantasy of two people escaping their troubles by imagining themselves gliding across moonlit water, a kind of soft-focus daydream set to music. And then there were the more familiar pieces, like These Foolish Things, which landed with a different kind of emotional weight. My mother played a lot of jazz when I was growing up, so those melodies carried me straight back to childhood — an unexpected trip down memory lane that added another layer to an already rich show.

Dick Lee’s saxophone and clarinet provide the show’s emotional counterweight. Ebullient, warm, and conversational, his playing feels like a dialogue with Adams rather than accompaniment. Holiday and Young’s musical compatibility famously verged on telepathy; Lee and Adams recreate that sense of intuitive exchange. Lee’s lines curl around Adams’ phrasing, sometimes shadowing it, sometimes nudging it forward, sometimes breaking away entirely to offer a commentary of their own. It’s a partnership built on trust, and it shows.

Phil Adams on guitar and Jerry Forde on bass complete the quartet with understated finesse. Adams’ guitar work is clean and spacious, never crowding the vocals, while Forde’s bass provides the steady heartbeat the show depends on. Together, they create arrangements that are respectful without being museum pieces—alive, responsive, and shaped by the room.

The narration threads through the performance with conversational ease. One moment, we’re hearing about Holiday and Young’s early camaraderie—his nickname  for her “Lady Day,” her “Pres” for him —and the next, we’re plunged into the silence of their three‑year estrangement. The show doesn’t sensationalise the rupture. Instead, it treats it as part of the larger tapestry of two artists navigating fame, addiction, racism, and the relentless grind of touring in segregated America.

And that’s where the Jim Crow material lands with force. The narrator doesn’t lecture; they illuminate. Jim Crow wasn’t an abstract policy—it was a daily logistical nightmare for Black musicians. Holiday and Young were barred from hotels, forced into back entrances, denied basic dignity. When Adams sings after these explanations, the songs carry a different weight. You feel the context pressing in.

The legal troubles are handled with similar nuance. Holiday’s arrests—mainly tied to drugs, always weaponised against her—are framed not as moral failings but as symptoms of trauma and exploitation. Young’s imprisonment, via military court‑martial for marijuana and alcohol possession, becomes another example of how Black artists were punished more harshly than their white counterparts. 

Structurally, the production moves with confident rhythm. Short stretches of storytelling give way to bursts of song. A quiet anecdote is followed by a musical punch. Paragraphs of history dissolve into a single held note. 

By the end, what stays with you  isn’t just the music, or the biography, or the historical detail. It’s the sense of two artists—Holiday and Young—trying to carve out space for themselves in a world determined to shrink them. The show honours that struggle without romanticising it.  It’s a reminder that the past isn’t past. It’s still singing.

Musical Soulmates is a production that deserves to be seen—not because it’s nostalgic, but because it’s honest. It celebrates two friends whose musical and spiritual compatibility bordered on the miraculous, and it does so with intelligence, warmth, and emotional clarity. Adams, Lee, Adams, and Forde deliver a show that feels both intimate and expansive, rooted in history yet alive in the present.

Reviewed by Pat Harrington

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