Broadway Baby – Melissa Errico
We can’t wait to welcome Broadway royalty, Melissa Errico, to Lichfield for the first time this year.
Since being famously cast as Eliza in the last Broadway revival of My Fair Lady in 1992, Melissa Errico has starred in Sunday in the Park with George, Passion and Les Misérables among many others. She has also become a concert, cabaret and recording artist. We chatted to her ahead of her Lichfield Cathedral show The Life and Loves of a Broadway Baby.
With a voice to melt hearts and a charismatic stage presence, Melissa Errico will be bringing some of that glamorous Broadway magic to Lichfield Festival, the only UK city outside London to get the chance to see this fabulous performer this summer. And, take note: “Any chance to hear Melissa Errico sing is a chance not to be missed,” says the New York Times.
Her show features a dazzling set of beloved standards from Rodgers & Hart to Lerner & Lowe, music from her latest ‘film noir’ album, and songs by two late, great, composing legends with whom she’s especially associated – Michel Legrand and Stephen Sondheim. It’s all interspersed with stories and anecdotes, and she’s joined by a stunning quartet from Ronnie Scott’s led by Lichfield Festival Associate Artist (and Ronnie Scott’s Artistic Director) pianist James Pearson.
Errico was introduced to the music of Legrand by her father, an orthopaedic surgeon and frustrated concert pianist. Some years later, she had the chance to audition for Legrand’s only Broadway musical, Amour, and was ultimately nominated for a Tony Award. “We became a working duet,” says Errico, “and he insisted on orchestrating for me an immense hundred-piece orchestra. That album became eventually my Legrand Affair. I was deeply moved both to be asked to write his eulogy in The New York Times and to be the one American singer at his amazing memorial at the Grand Rex in Paris.”
Through Amour a connection was made with Stephen Sondheim, composer of hit musicals including Company and A Little Night Music and lyricist of West Side Story. This led to her being offered the role of Dot in his musical Sunday in the Park with George in 2002 at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC.
“We corresponded richly when I was making my album dedicated to his music, Sondheim Sublime. We even shared the same birthday. I wrote once to point this out and he said, with false innocence, ‘Oh. Are you eighty-eight, too?!’” The resulting album was described in the Wall Street Journal as “the best all-Sondheim album ever recorded”.
Her latest album Out of the Dark: The Film Noir Project created during lockdown has a sultry, cabaret nightclub atmosphere. She’ll be bringing all that and more to Lichfield audiences. So, what to expect: “Swing, sensuality, some smarts, some sophistication, some sweetness. I’ve been trying to bring together a kind of ‘jazz adjacent’ singing, as in my current Noir album – which I’m proud to say just won the Bistro Award for best concept album – alongside the glories of Broadway. That’s the place I’m living right now, where jazz singing and theatre singing meet and blend. I’ve had a semi-secret jazz life since I was in my twenties, and it’s thrilling to be working now, out in the open, with the world’s greatest jazz musicians.”