Say this about singing actor Thomasina Petrus, who has drawn spotlights in such shows as "Two Queens One Castle" and "Diva Daughters DuPree": She knows how to take something small and make it bigger and tastier. The lump that she is dealing with is Lanie Robertson's "Lady Day at Emerson's Bar and Grill," a biographical revue featuring the music of jazz and blues legend Billie Holiday and garnished with drunken, scatterbrained monologues about her life.  

Robertson's script is frustratingly shallow and facile, with rants drawn from the encyclopedia entries on Holiday's painful life: born to the granddaughter of a slave in Baltimore; raped at 10; put out to prostitution at 16 before finding work as an entertainer; living the hard life of a black entertainer in segregated America before succumbing to heroin. Mercifully, we only see her decline, not her death, in "Lady Day."  

Through her singing and acting, Petrus makes the show into something beautiful and heartbreaking. Under the direction of Lou Bellamy at the intimate Old Arizona Theatre in Minneapolis, she captures the jazz icon in a high, crinkly voice that crackles with wry humor and cracks with pain.   Petrus' virtuosic performance invites theatergoers, sitting at candlelit tables in the Old Arizona's cabaret-style set-up, to close their eyes and journey, aurally, into Lady Day's anguish and heartaches. In her mouth, songs such as "Strange Fruit," "What a Little Moonlight Can Do" and "God Bless the Child" become successful glosses on Holiday's life.  

Petrus is accompanied by pianist Thom West, who seems to feel the soul with his fingers. But his sound is not enough; I kept wanting to hear a fuller ensemble - with drums and bass at a minimum - to make the show jam.   To director Bellamy's credit, Petrus does not give us an angry, scowling Holiday. She never really raises her voice in the show. Nor is the character resigned to her fate. She is a woman in decline trying to salvage some sense of dignity.   In words and gestures, Petrus renders Holiday's scatological humor with finesse. She recounts an incident during Holiday's tour with white bandleader Artie Shaw. After they stopped in a Southern restaurant, Holiday was made to eat in the kitchen. She needed to relieve herself but was told there were "no bathrooms for coloreds." After a bit of going back and forth, she let the hostess have it. Petrus makes us see the urgency of that situation.  

Holiday styled herself a jazz singer with a blues soul. Her voice was a nasal, high thing that was both beautiful and bruised. It was like a thing that could shimmer but was dulled by pressure. It is to Petrus' credit that she can re-create it in "Lady Day," not simply finding the prettiness that a simple mimetic impersonation might achieve but also the real bitterness, irony and heartbreak .

Rohan Preston is at rpreston@startribune.com .

Review: The script is frustratingly shallow, but singer-actor Thomasina Petrus gives a command performance as Billie Holiday, capturing the jazz icon in a high, crinkly voice that cracks with pain.