Tony Award-nominated Broadway superstar, recording artist and author Melissa Errico has been praised by The New York Times as “one of Sondheim’s deepest-hearted yet lightest-touch interpreters” while The Wall Street Journal called her 2018 album, Sondheim Sublime, “The best all-Sondheim album ever recorded.” Her new album SONDHEIM IN THE CITY, is Melissa’s kaleidoscopic vision of Sondheim’s songs of urban life, which Gramophone magazine said, “takes the musical theatre compilation album to a new level.” A street fair of New York scenes and moments, it summons back to life the poetic vision of a man who once confessed that his entire creative life had been spent in a twenty-block radius of Manhattan. From the wide-eyed newly-wed for whom a basement room with a quarter-inch view is all that she needs, to the cynical nouveau from New Rochelle who can’t choose between uptown and downtown for her bitter pleasures, Melissa celebrates and embodies New York characters, and their follies, of all kinds – with a clear arc of passage along the way. From innocence (“What More Do I Need?” and “Another Hundred People”) passing into experience (“The Little Things You Do Together”, “Everybody Says Don’t”) and arriving at the plaintive, bittersweet ambivalence that is Sondheim’s tonic note on “Good Thing Going” and “Sorry-Grateful” and the deeply emotional, and redemptive “Being Alive”, Melissa sings Sondheim as no one else can. She will also bring SONDHEIM IN THE CITY – IN CONCERT to London this summer, playing for one night only at The Cadogan Hall on Saturday, July 12.
She is known for her starring roles on Broadway, including My Fair Lady, High Society, Anna Karenina, White Christmas, Dracula, Les Misérables, and was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Actress in Michel Legrand’s Amour. She worked with Stephen Sondheim on productions of Sunday In The Park With George (Dot) at The Kennedy Center, John Doyle’s hit New York production of Passion (Clara) and Do I Hear a Waltz? (Leona) at City Center. She played the Baker’s Wife in a concert run of Into The Woods. For PBS television, she sang “Finishing The Hat” on Poetry In America, and included much Sondheim on her own TV special. Melissa also has a long association with the French composer Michel Legrand with whom she made a symphonic album: she wrote his eulogy for The New York Times, and was the only American to sing at his memorial at the Grand Rex in Paris.
Much praised for her recordings, she has received still more praise for her concerts, where she can add her own signature smart talk and sensual style to her sublime singing, offering a presence so impassioned that it led Opera News to call her “the Maria Callas of the American musical theatre”. Her concert life takes her from symphony halls with orchestras — from New York’s Carnegie Hall to, most recently, Texas and British Columbia– to intimate nightclubs, including regular residences at the Bal Blomet in Paris and Crazy Coqs in London.
Her work in recent years has also taken her into the new territory of jazz song, particularly in her Noir album, Out of The Dark: The Film Noir Project (Warner Music Group), which Broadway World called “an exploration into the world of darkness, passion, and mystery — a triumph of love that puts on full display the reasons why Melissa is one of the great musical interpreters of our time.” Reviewing her Montreal Jazz Festival concert with George Benson and his band in 2023, a writer from London Jazz News added that: “Errico was energized, making sure with every breath that she would get the audience in the 3000-seater Pelletier really on her side. Every high note was heroically held, and she got a standing ovation from this audience.”
Melissa has starred in many non-musical roles, especially in plays by Shaw and Oscar Wilde, including Dear Liar off-Broadway in the spring of 2023, playing Mrs. Patrick Campbell, George Bernard Shaw’s original Eliza Doolittle. She has appeared in films; and television with guest arcs on Cinemax’s “The Knick” and Showtime’s “Billions.” An accomplished author, she writes regularly for The New York Times in her column, “Scenes from An Acting Life”. Of Stephen Sondheim, Melissa has said “he is a musical north star,” and refers to his wisdom and inspiration as “life-saving, sheer joy, giving us all creative courage.”
“Sondheim in The City,” Melissa Errico’s tribute to Sondheim’s urbanity, feels like a New York house tour of thrill and heartbreak…You can almost hear the martini glasses clink—and shatter.” – The New York Times