Melissa Errico’s concert Season of Joy from Bay Street Theatre, New York is available until 4 January 2021.
Star rating: five stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Melissa Errico was a performer I was aware of but had never seen, her two London concert performances having passed me by. Then I caught her singing Sondheim’s ‘Children and Art’ on the streamed charity concert at the start of the Covid pandemic and was mesmerised and moved by her singing.
Season of Joy was filled with more of the same, interspersed with anecdotes and film clips of her family and a charming guest appearance by opera singer and Broadway star Paulo Szot.
The introduction by Scott Schwartz, the theatre’s artistic director, was interrupted by Errico, resplendent in sequins, who led us through the venue and onto to the stage where her accompanist Tedd Firth was seated, protectively masked, at the piano.
Watching on a tablet on New Year’s Day in a cold stone house in Spain that the roaring fire hadn’t yet permeated, I was instantly spun into a different world with the performer’s uplifting ‘My Favourite Things’, and her recounting that though reminiscent of Christmas, it was originally sung by a nun to a group of children with a sadistic Austrian military officer for a father!
Following with ‘Chestnuts Roasting’ which was written in the heat of California, in a jazz-inflected arrangement, we moved on to great Christmas songs all written by Jewish composers, exemplified by Irving Berlin’s ‘White Christmas’ which segued into ‘How Deep is the Ocean’.
Full of unexpected twists and turns, we moved on to a sequence of songs for Hanukkah. Tom Lehrer’s ‘Hanukkah in Santa Monica’, delightfully funny, giving way to one of the highlights of the evening, Errico’s performance of ‘I Have A Candle (Ner Li Dakik)’.
Heading off on another tangent, we were given a ‘woke’ rewriting by Adam Gopnik of ‘Baby, It’s Cold Outside’, duetted with Firth, followed by ‘Sleigh Ride’ which was interspersed with TikTok performances from her twin daughters. There was even a clip of her eldest playing tennis with husband Pat McEnroe, and she again displayed her humorous side in ‘I Can Cook Too’ from On the Town.
The wonders of technology then introduced a duet of ‘Make Someone Happy’ with Paulo Szot, part of a sequence of songs. Just as with Mary Martin and Ezio Pinza in South Pacific, his rich operatic baritone complemented her crystalline soprano.
Not afraid to mention brothels in a Christmas show, we then got ‘Hard Candy Christmas’ from The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, a yearning ballad about how the women would spend their Christmas holidays.
‘Jingle Bells’ and ‘Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas’ included clips of Errico as a little girl serenading neighbours accompanied by her father, matched with them doing the same live as adults.
Introducing her next song as being from a Sondheim show about cannibalism and human meat pies, Errico sang us ‘Not While I’m Around’ as only she can, that purity of line and tone always underpinned by care for the lyrics and deeply felt emotion.
And finally we ended with ‘A Little Love Can Make a Whole Lot of Christmas’ from composer Andrew Lippa’s Charlie Brown’s Christmas.
Errico’s charm and acting talent allied with Firth’s accompaniment and her impeccable choice of songs kept me gripped on a cold evening, laughter and tears bringing me warmth until the roaring fire kicked in. I never wanted it to end.
Leon Ferguson
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