A round-up of reviews from Irish Timeswriters.

The Billie Holiday Story at Everyman Palace, Cork

The Eureka Theatre production of The Billie Holiday Story is like nothing so much as the little girl in the nursery rhyme: when it is good it is very, very good but when it is bad it is horrid. And it is horrid more often than not.

It is written - if written is the word - as an accretion of biographical details through well-worn film and video material which needs a voice-over to make it relevant .

What might be generously called plot development follows through awkward on-stage dialogue which is never more than perfunctory, even when the evolution of Holiday's great song Strange Fruit is more or less explained via the brief appearance of song-writer Lewis Allen.

The impression is that the script, for which the credit is given to Brian Langtry and Len Holden, is held together by paper clips and that pages have gone missing without anyone much noticing. What musicians Holiday worked with, what and how she learned, how she made the progression from uncertain adolescent to a commanding performer - all this is ignored on the basis that what really matters here is the singing.

Which brings us to the good parts: Rain Pryor in the title role has a voice of greatly attractive quality, flexible and mellow, and her phrasing and intonation have a personal charm.

While this enhances both rhythm and rhyme it takes a while before the excitement of vocal improvisation enlivens the soft-focus jazz, although even then it seems as if some of the songs are shorter than remembered.

Backed by an excellent ensemble with Graham Lappin's particularly sympathetic piano, Pryor is a good enough singer and actress to let the voice coarsen with age and abuse: the questioning internalised elegies of the ending are unsentimental and convincing.

Linda Johnpierre as Ella Fitzgerald and Adi Wolfe as Maya Angelou are the other good things in a unashamedly contrived show. At the Millennium Forum, Derry, tonight. Mary Leland