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When Judy Holliday won a 1950 Oscar for her comic tour de force in “Born Yesterday,” her rivals included Gloria Swanson in “Sunset Boulevard” and Bette Davis in “All About Eve.” Not too shabby.
Seven years later, Holliday landed a best actress Tony for the musical “Bells Are Ringing” — over Julie Andrews in “My Fair Lady” and Ethel Merman in “Happy Hunting.”
And yet Holliday is a household name mainly among TCM devotees nowadays, maybe because of her short résumé: She made relatively few films, appeared only in a handful of Broadway plays and recorded just two albums before succumbing to breast cancer at 42, in 1965.
Willy Holtzman’s play with music “Smart Blonde” — the actress disguised her intelligence by playing ditzes — begins in late 1964. Holliday (Andréa Burns, alternatively piquant and affecting) is in a studio, trying to lay down vocals for a record she’s making with her boyfriend, jazz saxophonist Gerry Mulligan (Mark Lotito). But her voice keeps cracking, and “What’s the Rush” just isn’t happening.
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Cue flashbacks, because impending mortality will do that to a show.
It is not the smoothest start, and the rest of the play, directed by Peter Flynn at 59E59 Theaters, follows suit in a succession of barely connected scenes that feel as if Holtzman (“Sabina,” “The Morini Strad”) just plugged biographical highlights into a PowerPoint outline. (He does not mind artistic license, though; the recording sessions, for instance, were done in 1961.)
Here is Holtzman’s less-than-artful way to introduce Holliday’s buddies in the cabaret act the Revuers: “Adolph Green, I met him at socialist summer camp. He knows Betty Comden from college, and she has a pianist friend named Lenny.” (That would be Leonard Bernstein).
And so it goes: Greenwich Village nightclubs, Broadway, Hollywood, but also Holliday’s 10-year marriage to David Oppenheim (Lotito again), followed by her romantic rebound with Mulligan. Yetta Cohn, with whom the star was said to have had an affair — the pair are mentioned in Arthur Laurents’ memoir, “Original Story By” — pops up at regular intervals. She is portrayed with benevolent toughness by Andrea Bianchi, who is also highly amusing as writer and actress Ruth Gordon.
It was Gordon’s second husband, Garson Kanin (Jonathan Spivey), who wrote the role that, for better or for worse, became Holliday’s signature: Billie Dawn, the seemingly featherbrained lead of “Born Yesterday,” whose helium-fueled chirp induced people to underestimate her. “Higher is funnier,” Holliday says in the show. “I do it for comic effect.”
In a sense the actress reprised the part when she appeared in front of a Senate Internal Security Subcommittee trying to ferret out communists. Pretending to be dumb helped Holliday distract her interrogators; she never named names.
As disjointed as Holtzman’s script is, Burns, who created the part in the play’s 2014 premiere, holds the production together. She gave great turns as hairdresser Daniela in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s “In the Heights” and as Gloria Estefan’s mother in “On Your Feet!,” but here she displays a range that makes you wonder why she isn’t better known, or on Broadway casting directors’ speed dial.
Without making it feel like slavish impersonation, Burns captures Holliday’s vocal mannerisms (they sound put-on because they were, yet still feel oddly natural), wit and comic timing. But she also connects with Holliday’s vulnerability. When Burns, who, refreshingly, does not wear a body microphone, melts into “What’ll I Do” or “It Must Be Christmas,” it’s easy to forget who is singing. And that is not an impersonation, but a performance.
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“Smart Blonde”
Through April 13 at 59E59 Theaters, Manhattan; 646-892-7999, 59e59.org.
Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.