One of the hottest cabaret tickets in town this summer will be the visit of Deux Grandes Dames, New York superstar MELISSA ERRICO and her Parisian soulmate Isabelle Georges, to the Crazy Coqs in London’s Piccadilly on 10 and 13 July 2024.
Here Melissa Errico has all the answers to MTR contributor Jeremy Chapman’s questions about the show and life in general…
We’re very excited about your upcoming show at the Crazy Coqs next month – it’s two cabaret greats for the price of one with you sharing the stage with Isabelle Georges – Deux Grandes Dames. She guested on your last visit to London and blew us away. Tell us about how you got together and what treats you have in store for us.
Isabelle and I met a few summers ago when I was singing in Paris. What brought us together was our shared love for the music of Michel Legrand and, not incidentally, the truth that Michel had been a mentor for both of us. She had sung the same role in his musical, which played in America as Amour, singing in French what I sang in English. The moment we started singing together, we knew that we were sisters. We’re both “grandes dames” – meaning both tall ladies and divas – but her energy is more comic and tap-dancing, French music hall, while mine is more lyric and Broadway stage. Not to sound vain, but, in our way, it’s not unlike the chemistry between Julie Andrews and Carol Burnett, the pure sweet-sexy soprano and the antic alto-soprano. I just love being on stage with her. Who can explain what makes a duo work? Ours does.
Legrand has been a major inspiration to you as has Stephen Sondheim. Your Sondheim Sublime and Sondheim in the City albums have taken us to places others have not reached. What is it about those two geniuses that set them apart from and above the rest for you?
Well, there are many other composers out there who I admire, too. But yes, they are my two “stage husbands”, both now sadly gone. They’re opposites in a way. Steve is all satire and sublimity, with music that carries on some of the angular serialism of a Steve Reich; Michel is pure lyric expression, pouring out of some place where Debussy and Duke Ellington both live. I suppose I love them so much because their songs help me articulate two sides of my divided nature: the New York wised-up Broadway baby and the yearning girl dreaming of Paris and love. The funny thing is that I don’t think that either of them much liked the other! Steve thought that Michel’s music was too ‘soft’, I think, and Michel was indifferent to Steve’s angularities. But they meet in me.
You have many major acting credits on Broadway and elsewhere in the States from My Fair Lady to Passion but what part would tempt you over to do a musical in the West End?
It’s bad luck for an actress to yearn in public for a part! You’re supposed to be ladylike and wait for them to come. But I intend someday to put my mark on Desiree in Night Music – and meanwhile the team of David Shire and Adam Gopnik, whose first musical, Our Table, I recorded for a live cast album, have written a new musical about the life of Eleanor of Aquitaine that we’ll try out at the Cloisters cathedral in New York in the fall. It’s just my kind of part – a queenly woman with a feminist edge who falls in love with a reprobate troubadour.
Of course, you are now a seasoned and much-admired columnist for the New York Times and your fascinating sleeve notes on your latest Sondheim album, Sondheim in the City, are an object lesson in style and substance. Have you always loved writing and is there a novel in you waiting to come out?
A novel, a memoir, a book! One will come. Yes, I’ve always been writing, letters and diaries and journals and texted admonitions to my daughters – they make fun of my CAPS and spacing – and so the leap to publication was easy. (The editor at the New York Times told me that he’d heard me talking once and thought, ‘oh, she could write’.) Thank you for liking the liner notes, too – I wanted to write something ambitious and descriptive and not just politely deferential, as actresses are supposed to be. I’m happy to hear you liked that.
Are you a political animal and, if so, which of the two elderly gentlemen, one senile, the other unhinged, are you rooting for as your next President? And how concerned are you, as a mother of three, about the future of your country and the world they will be inheriting?
During the 2020 election, I did a ‘single’ with my dear friend and spiritual sister – another one! – the pianist Lara Downes, of the old standard ‘Happiness is Just a Thing Called Joe’. So, I suppose that says where I stand. Seriously, I believe that all of the values that Sondheim celebrates are at stake in November. As my friend Adam Gopnik points out, there’s no greater tribute to democratic pluralism than the finale of Act I of Sunday In the Park With George. People in a park peacefully co-existing in mutual if antic dignity. That’s what’s really on the ballot this year. Anyway, Trump has terrible taste in musicals. Nothing but Cats. What more can I say?
[Bonus Question!] You have achieved so much in your life, mixing bringing up a family successfully with pursuing a glittering, glamorous career, but what ambition, if any, remains unfulfilled?
Oh, that’s sweet of you to say, though of course from inside it feels more like a perpetual, often losing battle with chaos than any kind of glitter or glamour. But my ambitions are to do what I’m doing – make concerts and cabarets that have the shape and storytelling power of a stage musical – while opening the doors to more and more people. And I want to go on singing with Isabelle! And I want to write that book.
Bio
First known for her starring roles on Broadway, including My Fair Lady, High Society, Anna Karenina, White Christmas, Dracula, and Les Misérables, Melissa Errico has had a wide-ranging career from television and film to recording. She starred in the CBS show Central Park West and played roles on Blue Bloods, The Knick, and more, as well as Billions on Showtime. She has starred in many non-musical roles by Shaw and Oscar Wilde, including Dear Liar in the spring of 2023, playing George Bernard Shaw’s original Eliza Doolittle. Though a constant in the New York theatre, she has become equally known for her music and concert work worldwide, with sold-out concert dates from Ravinia to Caramoor and Wolf Trap – including the 92nd Street Y, Joe’s Pub, Town Hall and Lincoln Center’s Allen Room.
Errico’s history with Sondheim began when he selected her to star as Dot in Sunday in the Park With George at The Kennedy Center, then as Clara in Passion at Classic Stage Company; then in the NY City Center Encores! production of Do I Hear a Waltz? In 2020, she sang ‘Children and Art’ in the Sondheim 90th Birthday Concert Take Me to the World, and was featured on PBS television in a documentary special in which she sang a feminist version of Finishing the Hat and joined Adam Gopnik and Raul Esparza to talk Sondheim on Poetry in America. She was also featured in The New York Times tribute to Sondheim in November 2021 as one of the top ten interpreters of his work. Her second Sondheim album, Sondheim in the City, was released in February 2024, and earned her still more praise from the Times as “one of Sondheim’s deepest-hearted but lightest touch interpreters”.
In addition to Sondheim, nothing in her work has been more constant than her association with Legrand. Having starred in his sole Broadway show, Amour, she went on to collaborate with him on the iconic album Legrand Affair. Warner Music/Ghostlight Records also reissued her symphonic album, which Legrand arranged and conducted, as Legrand Affair (Deluxe Edition).
She is currently working on expanding her collected New York Times essays about a singer’s strange life on the stage and road, gathered under the heading Scenes From An Acting Life into a book. She has three daughters and is married to tennis player and journalist Patrick McEnroe.
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