In Her Latest Album Melissa Errico Celebrates Sondheim And New York City

For many performers getting a chance to work with Stephen Sondheim and play the pivotal role of Dot in Sunday In The Park With George might seem intimidating. But not for Melissa Errico.

In 2002, when she was cast in the Kennedy Center production of the musical, a musical that had already won the 1985 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and was nominated for 10 Tony Awards, Errico had an idea for her character. Instead of singing the epic song, “Color and Light” at a makeup table as Dots before her had done, she had a different idea.

“I gaily told him that I wanted to do Dot’s big “Color and Light” scene, where she waits for George to take her to the Follies, nude in a bath,” says Errico. “I had been an art history major in college. “And I knew that impressionist paintings were filled with dancers taking baths.”

This was on the early side of Errico’s career. She didn’t understand that she wasn’t supposed to tell Sondheim how to stage his work. “But he accepted it, maybe because it amused him or because he actually thought it was a good idea,” says Errico. So that’s how their first connection went. “Me: impetuous,” she says. “Him: patient.”

Errico, a Tony nominee, who has starred on Broadway in High Society, Dracula, Les Misérables, Irving Berlin’s White Christmas, and My Fair Lady as Eliza Doolittle, would go on to have a rich connection with Sondheim for years becoming a friend and collaborator.

In addition to Sunday in the Park with George, Errico starred in his shows Passion and Do I Hear A Waltz? Sondheim consulted on her 2018 record, “Sondheim Sublime.” Then in 2022, a year after he passed away, she made her Carnegie Hall debut co-starring in a Broadway concert with the New York Pops, performing several Sondheim songs to honor him.

Just this month Errico debuted her latest album “Sondheim In The City” from Concord Theatricals Records. Produced by Rob Mathes who has produced many artists including Sting, Elvis Costello, Carly Simon and Bruce Springsteen, the record focuses on Sondheim’s New York stories while Errico embodies a mosaic of New York characters.

“It’s my most swinging, big band kind of album, with horns and strings and great jazz drumming,” says Errico who is currently performing songs from the album along with other great classics at Birdland Jazz in a concert called “A Manhattan Valentine.” She also has another “Sondheim In The City” concert engagement at 54 Below May 7th through May 9th which will celebrate her special vinyl album release. “Someone compared the record to Ella Fitzgerald’s American Songbook albums. And while I wouldn’t dream of putting myself at that height, I did think it was the right kind of aspiration.”

Errico combines the popular and beloved Sondheim classics (”Being Alive,” “Anyone Can Whistle”) with songs that that you don’t often hear on Sondheim albums (”Can That Boy Foxtrot!,” “Uptown, Downtown.”) There’s even a song called “Dawn,” from the unproduced film, Singing Out Loud.

“I wanted a mix of classic familiar songs, like “Another Hundred People,” with little known but equally beautiful songs, like the album-opener “Dawn,” says Errico. “I wanted all songs about the city, but I decided to draw a wide, intuitive ring around the idea of a New York song. So, I included a couple of good ones that aren’t specifically spelled out as New York songs but that are so much about city people.”

For Errico the record embodies what she adores about Sondheim’s work. “It seems to me that he’s somehow both the wittiest and the wisest of the great songwriters. You sing something like “Uptown/Downtown” with its crazy internal rhyme scheme, or something really clever and naughty like “Can That Boy Foxtrot.” And you just shiver at his virtuosity,” she says. “But then you come upon something as truthful and painful as “Sorry Grateful “ or “Being Alive” and you submit to his honesty. It’s the two things at once. And that he knows there are always two things at once going on in our experience.”

Jeryl Brunner: What do you hope people take from the album?

Melissa Errico: A sense of renewed beginning, perhaps. We all went through the pandemic, and in a sense we ‘lost’ New York then. Certainly our familiar Manhattan. Broadway closed for the first time in its history. And we’re getting it back now, maybe, but with lots of quavers and questions attached.

I wanted to do something exuberant that was also questioning, that made us think in new ways about Sondheim and his city. I hope that if there’s a takeaway from the record it’s the power of change, how things alter all the time in our lives. Downtown becomes uptown. A naïve girl in a little apartment becomes a woman surveying the town. How that constant wave of change is positive and good. I want to help reignite Manhattan, just a little.

Brunner: What was your initial impression of Sondheim? And what might surprise people about him and how he worked?

Errico: Steve, whenever I worked with him, or corresponded with him, always impressed me by his unique mix of sternness and kindness. He was always extremely strong and even unyielding. Someone once called him “ornery” about what the song meant and how it derived from a scene and a story. But he wasn’t at all dictatorial about how you sang the song. He admired the freedom of an interpretive artist, and what new emotion you might bring to his work.

He once wrote to me, in effect, that I should sing the song and then be free to be a “big band singer,” meaning a freely creative jazz scat and swing artist. He wanted both. And he could learn. He once chided me for a quotation from an actress I used in a New York Times piece that didn’t correspond with his own memories. And I wrote back that I thought that everyone had a right to their own account of their experience. He wrote back gently that that was true, and, jokingly, that I was more generous than he was.

Brunner: So many people say that Sondheim had a gift for making artists feel special and that their work mattered. Do you have a story that sticks out for you?

Errico: One of my favorite stories about working with him involved the time that we were together at the sitzprobe of Passion. That’s when you work with the orchestra for the first time. And he kept insisting that I “sing the apostrophe” in words like ‘wouldn’t’ and ‘couldn’t”. They shouldn’t be slurred together.

“Sing the silence!” he would say. I always work hard on my diction, on shaping every vowel clear and landing every consonant sharply so that the lyricist’s words are really heard. And so I loved the challenge. It became a little game between us as we went through the songs.

Brunner: What would you like people to know about your performance residency at Birdland Jazz?

Errico: They asked me to do a Birdland residency over Valentine’s Day week last year and it worked out so well that they asked me back this year. I’m hugely grateful. I’m mostly going to be mixing in Sondheim’s city songs with other New York classics from Joni Mitchell to Billy Joel. I can promise a sexy, swinging, funny night of classic songs of many moods and spirits. Perfect date night material.