As a cabaret performer, Melissa Errico is known as much for her erudite patter as she is for her voluptuous beauty and buttery, fluttery soprano. “A critic once called me Jessica Rabbit with a PhD,” the singer, also a Broadway veteran, mused early on the night of Valentine’s Day, while launching her third annual residency commemorating the holiday at Birdland Theater.
But this evening would be different, she promised: “Tonight is for love,” cooed Errico, who in her décotellage-flaunting gown, with her trademark curls flowing, looked not unlike Botticelli’s Venus. “I’m going to do a more intellectual show when I have more clothes on.”
Mind you, Errico’s program, titled “I Can Dream, Can’t I?,” proved as impeccably curated as any of her outings, dipping into the catalogs of romantic authorities ranging from Irving Berlin and Johnny Mercer to Stevie Wonder and Antonio Carlos Jobim. The still unsurpassed wit and poignance of Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart got particular attention, although notably, Errico did not include “My Funny Valentine”; that would have been too obvious, I guess.
After kicking things off with a slowed-down, come-hither reading of Mercer and Harold Arlen’s “Come Rain or Come Shine,” Errico immediately attended to a fellow sitting near the stage for whom, she feared, the sound was too loud. “Are you happy?” the singer asked, with a genuine, sunny solicitousness she would sustain throughout the set. “Just tell me you’re happy.”
The gentleman assured her that he was, and so, clearly, were his fellow audience members—many of them couples, not surprisingly—as Errico dove into Irving Berlin’s “Lost in His Arms,” declaring it the sexiest song ever written. As she would through much of the set, Errico lingered in the lower and middle regions of her substantial vocal range; the higher notes, when they arrived, were like bright, shiny tokens of affection.
The first Rodgers and Hart selections were served as a two-hander, with Errico segueing from an ebullient “Dancing on the Ceiling” to the melancholy “He Was Too Good to Me.” Drily noting that the latter focused on “a girl who screwed it all up,” Errico then quickly shifted gears, offering an upbeat, winking take on Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II’s “The Gentleman is A Dope.” “This time,” she pointed out, “it’s all his fault.”
Backed by an excellent jazz trio led by pianist Andy Ezrin, with bassist David Finck and drummer Eric Halvorson, Errico kept things swinging for “Watch What Happens,” one of several featured tunes by Michel Legrand, who was her frequent collaborator and champion, with lyrics by the songwriters Alan and Marilyn Bergman—partners in art and, until Marilyn’s death three years ago, love for some six decades, as Errico duly noted.
A more reflective segment featured that threesome’s “Windmills of Your Mind,” alongside lyrical originals by Finck and Errico’s brother Michael, an accomplished songwriter himself. A pair of Wonder’s many gems, “You and I” and “Ribbon in the Sky,” was followed by the Rodgers and Hart treasure “There’s a Small Hotel” and a lustrous rendering of Jobim’s “Fotografia.”
Errico then mined the show’s title song, a meditation on unrequited love by Sammy Fain and Irving Kahal, for its sensual underpinnings, almost finding solace in longing, and closed with a joyful romp through Rodgers and Hart’s “The Lady is a Tramp,” stressing that, as Whitney Houston sang most famously, learning to love yourself is the greatest love of all.
Returning for an encore, Legrand and the Bergmans’ “What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?,” Errico received a long-stemmed rose from her own longtime husband, the tennis player and broadcaster Patrick McEnroe. “Love really isn’t a club act,” she had demurred earlier. “It’s not something you can do on a cabaret stage.” Perhaps, but with “I Can Dream,” she delivered a most delightful facsimile.
Melissa Errico: I Can Dream, Can’t I? opened February 14, 2025, at Birdland and runs through February 16. Tickets and information: birdlandjazz.com
