Out of the Dark: The Film Noir Project – Melissa Errico – Crazy Coqs

Picture: Danny Kaan

Out of the Dark: The Film Noir Project – Melissa Errico at the Crazy Coqs, London.

Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩

How lucky that in the space of six weeks we have had not one, not two, but three of America’s greatest cabaret divas entertaining us so royally in London.

Following the dazzling brilliance of the Callaway sisters, it was Melissa Errico’s turn to enchant us with her Film Noir show. The inspiration for it came when overdosing on late-night movies, mostly in black and white, during the pandemic.

Those were the days of private eyes and femmes fatales, Robert Mitchum and Barbara Stanwyck were inevitably the bad guys, romance and gangsters were never far apart.

We’re talking the 1940s and the 1950s, and Errico, embodying old-style Hollywood glamour in shimmering black dress and kiss-me bright red lipstick, took us on a magic carpet ride there with a 15-song set evoking an era when cinema was king.

This was the second time in London this year for this perfectly-pitched, crystal-clear actress-singer who came over in March with her Michel Legrand tribute. It was after seeing that show that I wrote: “With Melissa you get the full package… it’s not just the voice, it’s the way she stretches words and phrases, the expressive use of hands and body, that makes this Long Island mother-of-three so special, visually as well as vocally.”

This visit was primarily to promote her 17-track Out of the Dark album (Ghostlight Records). Four of those 17 were omitted for her cabaret at the Crazy Coqs including ‘The Man Who Got Away’ but her London audience instead got two numbers not on the album, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s ‘The Gentleman is a Dope’ and one Stephen Sondheim wrote for the 1993 noirish movie Dick Tracy.

That was ‘Sooner Or Later’ and it was ironic that this Sondheim devotee – her Sondheim Sublime CD is a cracker – lost her way on it when trying to accompany herself on the ukulele and struggled to find the right chords.

Who would have expected Rodgers and Hammerstein in a noir compilation but their ‘Dope’ number from the 1947 show Allegro (a rare flop that never came to London) was well worth its place, as was the upbeat Harry Warren/Leo Robin number ‘Checkin’ My Heart’. They provided the change of pace the show needed.

From 1934 (‘Blame It On My Youth’) through the 1940s (‘Laura’, Angel Eyes’, ‘Haunted Heart’, ‘It Was Written in the Stars’ and ‘Again’), the 1950s (‘The Bad and the Beautiful’, ‘Checkin’ My Heart’), a dip into the 1980s with the Cy Coleman/David Zippel song from City of Angels ‘With Every Breath I Take’ and right through to ‘Farewell, My Lovely’ and the terrific ‘Shadow and Light’ from David Shine and Adam Gopnik, the storyteller in Errico had full rein.

The last two contemporary numbers fitted seamlessly into the Noir framework as did Jeremy Sams’ English version of Legrand’s ‘Amour, Amour’ and ‘On Vit, On Aime’ (Peter Foley/Gopnik). It wasn’t until the finale that the stylish Errico draped herself coquettishly on top of the piano but it was well worth the wait.

The Broadway star brought her musical director Tedd Firth, who had some splendid piano solo moments, over from New York but the remainder of the quartet, with Graeme Blevins’ soaring saxophone adding raunchy colour to proceedings, were borrowed from Ronnie Scott’s. Sam Burgess on upright bass and Chris Higginbottom on drums made the most of the opportunity to back an undoubted global star.

Jeremy Chapman