Roughly ten minutes into her show, Melissa Errico tells us “Now I’m not going to sing all the clichés of the stage-struck New Yorker, but I guess I am going to be the biggest cliché of all, the hyper girl who comes to New York with dreams of being on Broadway. That is the only cliché, I promise.” She’s wrong about that—she renders every song and every piece of patter with so much sincerity and upbeat energy that it’s the opposite of a cliché. You might think Ms. Errico’s strongest asset is her beauty, meaning both sonic (those amazing chops) and visual (that face which, despite her own protestations in self-penned articles in the New York Times, would still empower her to play ingenue roles into her 50s) but in actuality, it’s her irrepressible enthusiasm.
Shortly after this line, Ms. Errico gives us a trio of what the late Sammy Cahn would have called “special lyrics”— what most of us call parodies—three iconic songs of the city outfitted with topical, pandemic-specific words by her frequent professional partner Adam Gopnik (still in his day job a mostly political columnist for The New Yorker). Yet even when singing “We’ve Lost Manhattan” (courtesy of Rodgers & Hart) or “What’s Happened to My New York?” (ditto Cole Porter), Ms. Errico can’t hide the smile on her face. Someone else might be dismayed by the masking, the vaccines, the proof-of-same cards, the boosters, or the ouch-y and sometimes grouch-y Dr. Fauci, but there’s no cynicism in anything that Ms. Errico sings. It’s as if the topsy-turvy events of the last two years have heightened, rather than diminished, her love for the city, and for music and theater.
Ms. Errico (supported by the formidable Tedd Firth, whose accompaniment is so strong it should be the subject of its own 700-word review) tells us that her passion for the theater is genetic, beginning with her Aunt Rose, a Ziegfeld girl who danced her way from the boat that brought her from her native Italy right up and into the original 1927 production of Show Boat. This story is woven into three songs in a row that are more characteristically meant to be highly cynical. “Another Hundred People,” “Life Upon the Wicked Stage,” and “Confession” more usually take a bittersweet albeit humours look at the darker side of, respectively, New York, the business of show, and, in the last, romance and sex. And yet in all of them, Ms. Errico finds her way back to the sunny side of the street: the big city is a stink pool, the glamour of the theater pales beside the more immediate need for beer and sandwiches, yet she loves them anyway, she wouldn’t change them for a ton of gold. In “Wicked Stage,” traditional female virtues are cast aside as irrelevant (not even “tested”) and in the Dietz/Schwartz “Confession,” they are actually more of a hindrance. (“I always go to bed at ten, but I go home…” she sings, and I’ve never seen another singer milk this last line so patiently and effectively, “…. at four.” There’s ample time enough in that pause to easily down another shot.)
Ms. Errico has promised to spare us clichés, but I can’t resist the one in which a collection of songs in a one-woman show becomes described as a “journey.” It’s not a very long one in terms of geography, mostly between her Manhasset upbringing and the Shubert Alley of her adolescent dreams, yet the philosophical distance between the burbs and the big time is a voyage that takes her across the length and the breadth of the songbook from Jerome Kern and Kurt Weill to Joni Mitchell and Laura Nyro. Despite seeing the waiters at Feinstein’s shuffling back and forth between tables with those now-omnipresent face masks, we leave the room re-energized and uplifted; Ms. Errico’s love for the city and what she’s doing is even more contagious than the virus.
Melissa Errico Sings Her New York opened September 27, 2021 at Feinstein’s/54 Below and runs through November 21. Tickets and information: 54below.com
