Tony Award-nominated Broadway star, recording artist, and author Melissa Errico is back with a concert created especially for the Southampton Cultural Center’s Concerts in the Park series, July 27, at 6:30 PM at Agawam Park.
In “Broadway Baby,” Errico sets her own life to the Broadway songs that she has performed — and both offers a set of beloved standards and a series of witty and sometimes wicked stories about a girl’s, and then a woman’s, life passed on the Great White Way.
First known for her starring roles on Broadway including “My Fair Lady,” “Les Misérables,” her new album “Out Of The Dark: The Film Noir Project” was just released. Her recent album, “Sondheim Sublime,” was called by The Wall Street Journal “The best all-Sondheim album ever recorded.” Her history with Stephen Sondheim began when he selected her to star as Dot in “Sunday In The Park With George” at The Kennedy Center, and she went on to star in his shows “Passion” and “Do I Hear A Waltz?” Errico will be co-starring in Carnegie Hall’s big tribute concert to Stephen Sondheim on November 18.
Another constant has been her association with composer Michel Legrand. Having starred in his sole Broadway show, “Amour,” she went on to collaborate with him on the iconic album “Legrand Affair.” After his death in 2019, she was asked to write his eulogy by The Times and was invited to be the sole American performer in the two-day memorial to Legrand at Paris’s Le Grand Rex Theatre. Warner Music recently reissued her symphonic album, which Legrand arranged & conducted, as “Legrand Affair: Deluxe Edition.”
In the family department, Errico is married to tennis star and broadcaster Patrick McEnroe, and they have three daughters. They also have a house on the East End.
Melissa took a moment to sit down and chat with us.
“Broadway Baby” is such a wonderful idea — your life through the songs that inspired you. What is the first song you remember singing, when you were a wee one?
One of my key memories is going door to door with my parents at Christmas time on Long Island and — this is almost hard to credit, but it’s true — arriving unannounced at people’s houses, barging into their living room, and singing Christmas songs while my father accompanied me on the piano. They seemed…happy. I suppose that’s where I got the habit of fearlessness in front of an audience, not to mention learning a nice roster of Christmas songs, (which I was able to share in my Sag Harbor Christmas show in the depths of the pandemic).
Although you are associated with show tunes, you must have had some teenage angst and a rock anthem at some point. Have you ever given yourself over to a good screeching guitar and belted out some Beatles or Who or Rolling Stones stuff?
Oh, I love rock! I’m a child of the ‘80s, and a hard-core Steely Dan and Rickie Lee Jones fan, and I’ve also done a couple of Beatles songs: “Blackbird” in particular. (Not a screecher, but very Beatles). My voice and sensibility are better adapted to the more poetic reaches of pop, I suppose — I’m proud that I was one of the first cabaret-concert singers to self-consciously employ the “second American songbook,” and my shows wouldn’t be complete without a Joni Mitchell or Randy Newman or James Taylor or Billy Joel number. And maybe I could add in The Who’s “Sunrise” or The Stones’ “Angie.” I never want to get “typed.”
I once ended up getting “new hair” from the same wig supplier who did all the great hair bands of the ‘90S. So, I do have that connection.
This year we’ve lost some Broadway greats, including Steve Sondheim and your good friend (and my stepdad), Tony Walton. Anything you want to share?
Where to begin with either? Steve was my master, my (sometimes reluctant) mentor, sometimes almost my reason for being. Serving his songs up to his standards is one of the most satisfying parts of my career: we exchanged countless e-mails when I was making “Sondheim Sublime,” and proud as I am of how much I pleased him, I’m also rather proud that I stood up to him from time to time — about the album title for instance — which I think pleased him even more. He was an often ornery but never closed-minded man. The space he left is unfillable by anyone.
Tony Walton was even more than that: he was my consolation, my rock, sometimes my best friend. His genius shone through his work as a director and designer of course, but even more through the warmth and love he shone on us all as a man. His space can’t be fulfilled either, except by trying to extend his example in my own life to bless and support others as selflessly as he did me.
Can you tell me about your association with Michel Legrand?
Michel Legrand was the disembodied spirit of sensuality in my house growing up. My father, a concert pianist by vocation though a doctor in practice, would play Michel’s music to seduce my mother, and I would see it change the chemistry in the house. So, years later when I was asked to star in his only Broadway musical, “Amour,” it was literally like a dream coming true
We liked working with each other so much that he arranged an entire album of music for me, which became my record “Legrand Affair” — arrangements for a 100-plus piece orchestra, “oceanic but intimate” as he said. He was a unique spirit, from whom music just poured, like the flow of water over a waterfall, with that completely unimpeded way some gifted people have of not even remembering what it was they just said or created or played.
You also have written prodigiously for The New York Times. Do you think about writing a book or compiling your essays?
I think about both, all the time, and hope finally to be full time at work on it this summer. My ideal would be to write a real book, with an ongoing arc and narrative, that would also enclose in slightly altered form, my insights from the Times pieces about sex stereotypes, the perils of auditioning, Zoom musicals, and the rest. Nora Ephron and Anaïs Nin are my two ever-consulted heroines; if you can imagine a collaboration between them, that would be my (obviously unrealizable!) ideal.
Any childhood memories of the East End?
When I was really little, we didn’t summer out here (we stayed in Manhasset and went to our school’s day camp), except for a certain annual family day trip “to Montauk.” My father managed to make it sound really really far, and really really special, as if we had gotten a ticket to the actual moon. We went and it was treated like the moon. Magical. Special. Unusual. The only other time I remember that sensation was when my mother got us tickets to see King Tut’s tomb in 1978 at The Met, which was also a huge magical deal. When we were really little, my parents gave certain experiences a mystical edge.
I have been coming out east since college. And then in my early career, Guild Hall invited me practically every summer for some fantastic concerts surrounded by legends like Kitty Carlisle and Julie Andrews. Working with Betty Comden and Adolph Green at Bay Street was too good to be true, and having a barbecue in Tony Walton’s backyard with them was surreal. By the time Patrick and I had children, we were in a groove out here.
My memories become more kaleidoscopic — naked kids, playing with paints in the yard (painting each other, in diapers!), farm stands, laughing, the beach, a rental house where we ordered butterflies online and let them grow and released them into a garden. Finding a plastic toy reindeer in the sand and building a whole myth around it. Stuff like that; magic, my own mystical legacy for three young ladies.
Lena Horne and Phyllis Newman, among others, brought a show similar to “Broadway Baby” to the Great White Way. Is that a possibility for you?
Yes, indeed! I’d love to do a long-form one-woman show on stage, with a plot and a point. I did one version of a show about women’s silence, “Sing The Silence,” co-written with Adam Gopnik of The New Yorker fame, for a couple of nights at the Public Theater a few years ago — Tony Walton in particular loved it and encouraged me to revisit it. I hope to revive it, or perhaps slip some of its themes into some other new show about women suppressed and silenced and seeking to sing despite it all.
Of course, releasing one’s inner goddess — feet on the ground, voice open, courage brightly on — is what we all need to be able to do.
For more about Melissa, visit melissaerrico.com. For tickets, see scc-arts.org.
