Melissa Errico – Courtesy of Michael Lavine. Used with permission.
Tony nominated actor-singer-recording artist-writer Melissa Errico, who last performed at Feinstein’s at Hotel Carmichael in February 2022, makes her return to the popular Carmel night spot to headline in “The Life & Loves of a Broadway Baby.” Accompanied by sought after Tedd Firth, her pianist-music director of twelve years, Errico performs on Friday, Jan. 5 and Saturday Jan. 6 at 7:30 p.m. Recently I spoke with Errico via a Zoom call from Norway where she was on holiday with her family. Below is an edited transcript of our chat and email communication.
Where are you currently?
I am in Oslo. We arrived in Norway with our three teenage daughters more or less on a whim, it was a cheap flight and an interesting wintry destination. I can’t say it is my spiritual home, but the girls are having a magical, alarming time, cross-country skiing and actually harnessing, on their own, dogs for a dog sled ride. I hate conventional vacations. The one time I was on a Caribbean Island, I left that afternoon, so I am glad to share something so out of the way. We are going to the Munch Museum. I was an art history major in college and any chance I get to take my girls to look at strong pictures in an out of the way museum matters so much to me. It is my magic. I am the embodiment of Sondheim’s anthem, “Children and Art.” I am perpetually balancing the impossible. Of my three daughters, two are twins who are fifteen. One is a Balanchine ballet dancer. My oldest daughter just got into Duke where she will be playing tennis. My husband is former tennis player and broadcaster Patrick McEnroe.
What’s it like being married to a tennis celebrity?
I have known Patrick since I was a child. He was my older brother’s best friend growing up. Then we connected again in my early twenties, when we were both still finding our adult selves, and in December we celebrated our twenty-fifth anniversary. Does the phrase “life-partner” mean anything? If it does, that defines it. Also, he has given me more great tennis metaphors to make sense of the performer’s life than I deserve, such as “Wait for the ball. Let it come to you.”
Melissa Errico & Marilyn Maye – Courtesy of Michael Lavine. Used with permission.
Of all the genres you perform in, how does cabaret stack up?
When I first started, I treated cabaret as a kind of side-alley to theater singing, but in recent years cabaret —or what I think of as cabaret concert —has become for me a wonderful form of entertainment and self-expression. I try to write whole shows, like funny, sexy little stories, which tell a complete tale — in this case of Broadway Baby, about my show-girl heritage and my New York theatrical passions. It is a way of doing shapely one-woman shows while still singing your face off. I just love it. And I am more inspired by the cabaret singing heritage. I worship the great Marilyn Maye, whom I profiled for The New York Times this year. Ninety-five and singing better than ever. That is my ideal.
What makes Tedd Firth so special as a pianist-music director?
Tedd is a real jazz poet who is also a brilliant self-effacing accompanist. There isn’t any relation more subtle and complicated than the one between a singer and her accompanist – you want somebody who supports you but pushes you, who gets the spirit of your approach to the song without too much explanation – but who doesn’t mind an explanation when you need to offer one. And who can lock in with you in a shared spell when the moment calls for it and then offer a solo of perfect minimal elegance. Tedd is everybody’s ideal accompanist, and I am blessed to have him. Also, he shares my taste for out of the way songs and unexpected tempi.
Who are your major music influences?
All the great Broadway shows I saw as a girl are what fired me up to want to belong to that world: “A Chorus Line,” “Me and My Gal,” and “On Your Toes. I worship the legacy of all the women singers who preceded me and made their lives in this rich demanding art form: Barbara Cook and Edyie Gorme and Jo Stafford and, of course, Streisand. I am reading her autobiography now, like everybody else, and her courage and self-confidence knocks me sideways. She inspires me to be braver.
Who are your influences in general?
I am going to release next month my new album, the second volume of my singing Sondheim, called “Sondheim in The City.” All his New York songs. Steve Sondheim was certainly the major influence on my musical life. I adore his ambivalence, his audacity, his bittersweet charm. I was lucky enough to work with him several times on stage and to exchange many e-mails with him about songs and meanings when I was making my first Sondheim album, “Sondheim Sublime.” He could be demanding, but he was always open to a new idea or approach. At the Kennedy Center, I ingenuously adapted one number in “Sunday in The Park with George,” in which I sang nude in a bathtub, since it seemed to me so right for the Impressionist period, He accepted the idea, and made slight alterations in the lyric for it. I was too young to know how audacious I was being, but he embraced it. That is a lesson in itself: be open to crazy young people. They might be right!
Why are you a performer?
Why am I a performer? At five am in airports, I often wonder. Seriously, it is because the high you get from connecting with an audience, that intimate feeling of perfect communication through words or music is like no other feeling I have ever known. When the audience levitates in the room, and you do too, you feel you have found the meaning of life — or of my life, anyway.
What drives you?
Like everybody, I’m driven by ambition, curiosity, the need to make a living…but these days I’m driven more and more by the desire to get it right, to give the songs in a concert exactly the right shape and sexuality, to go deeper into a lyric than I’ve ever gone before, to be more audacious and comical than I was with the same parody lyric last year. I am driven by the need to be better and go deeper. It leaves me discontented with myself some of the time, but it seems worthwhile. I am Don Quixote with long tresses in a sequined gown.
What can folks expect when seeing your Feinstein’s show?
The theme is biographical. I was a Broadway baby. I started “pounding 42nd St.
to be in a show” when I was about twelve. And the general point is that I am still doing it.
You’ll get a story of the influences such as Michel Legrand, Sondheim and the Broadway shows that I have done. It is called “The Life and Loves of a Broadway Baby.” There is some of my personal life in music relationships, like the late Comden and Green, who were at my wedding and who were good friends (and teachers) …with a strong jazz sort of sound, a little bit like the influence that I’ve taken from my time with Marilyn Maye. (My own pianist has referred to me as “jazz-adjacent”) Marilyn is very much an actor, but she likes the vocabulary of jazz, so her influence, I believe is there. I think in the end you should feel that I have been doing this my whole life. I also come from a family that in the 1800s arrived from Italy and were Ziegfeld girls.
I understand your grandmother was an opera singer.
Yes, a lyric soprano who performed radio shows, and her sister was one of Ziegfeld’s favorites at a time (I have a New York Times feature on her from 1927!) and Rose was in many things, such as Ziegfeld’s “Showboat.”
So, you were born in a trunk?
That’s it. It is a showgirls show.
What advice would you give to a young person who wishes to become a performer?
When I was eleven or twelve, I was eating in a Manhattan restaurant with my family when my mother spotted Marian Seldes at another table. She told me that she was a great actor and that I should go over and ask her what I ought to do to become one, since that was my very much announced ambition. I did go over and asked her how to become a great actor. I cannot believe it, but I did, and she looked at me kindly and said, “Live.” At the time it was a mysterious koan to me. I did not want to just live, I wanted to act, but now of course I recognize its wisdom. Everything you do in life becomes everything you are on stage. The more experience of art, life and everything you bring with you, the richer will be the experience you share. It is simple, but it takes, well, a lifetime of living to achieve. Look: Marilyn Maye is ninety-five and still growing as an artist.
For tickets and information about “The Life and Loves of a Broadway Baby,” visit feinsteinshc.com
