Sondheim in the City: Melissa Errico – Cadogan Hall

Sondheim in the City: Melissa Errico at Cadogan Hall, London.

Star rating: five stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

For more than two and a half hours, multi-talented New York songstress Melissa Errico enchanted, enthralled and captivated an almost-full Cadogan Hall while bravely concealing her concern over two frail parents who couldn’t be at her London concert debut.

Errico had wanted both to join tennis ace husband Patrick McEnroe – over here to commentate on Wimbledon for ESPN – and one of her three daughters in the audience at the Chelsea venue.

It wasn’t to be but, like the great trouper she is, the star of the show came out with all guns blazing in her top hat and gave the performance of her life. She was honouring the genius who is her inspiration in an extended visual version of her sizzling 2024 album Sondheim in the City where she puts into context how the Manhattan environment shapes his lyrics and captures the Metropolitan lifestyle he never wavered from.

A New Yorker all his life, as she is, Errico reflected his irrepressible enthusiasm for the city through such classics as ‘Another Hundred People’, ‘Broadway Baby’ and ‘Being Alive’. She told us how, after his death, she had pretended to be a potential buyer of the 49th Street house where he had lived, regularly at war with his confrontational film-star neighbour Katharine Hepburn, so that she could look where and how he produced some of the greatest words and music of his time and all time.

A theme of the show was the way so many of his songs were contradictions. ‘Sorry-Grateful’ was one obvious example, saying something and immediately counterpointing it with a “but”. The hilariously complex ‘(Not) Getting Married Today’ from Company and a curio ‘Nice Town, But’ (don’t forget the comma!) from a never-produced 1953 show Climb High, written long before Sondheim hit the big time with West Side Story, both underscored the point but the number that most resonated with me was her exquisitely phrased ‘Anyone Can Whistle’, the ultimate contradiction. “Anyone can whistle, that’s what they say –Easy,” the song says, “It’s all so simple, Relax, let go, let fly, So someone tell me why. Can’t I?”

Anyone like me who can’t do the easy things in life, drive a car, mend a fuse, work a remote, will immediately identify with these deceptively simple lyrics – and Errico, in her crystal-clear, intellectual way, told me more about this song than I had ever taken from it before.

These “buts” were how Sondheim viewed life itself. When he gave Errico a note after  rehearsal at Do I Hear A Waltz?, one of three Sondheim musicals in which she starred, it said “You were fabulous… most of the time”. He couldn’t resist.

I could go on and on about the 21 numbers this sublime star treated us to, like a slow, resigned, jazz-inflected ‘Send in the Clowns’ as nobody has ever done before, a particular favourite of hers, ‘Move On’, and a particular favourite of mine that closed the set. ‘With So Little to Be Sure Of’. I’ve seen the naughty ‘Can That Boy Fox Trot!’ done more suggestively but maybe this was more in keeping for what used to be a Christian Science church.

There was just one non-Sondheim moment – ‘My Favourite Things’ from The Sound of Music coming after an anecdote of her time as a young intern at the King’s Head in London where she honed her Cockney rhyming slang, good training for her Broadway debut in My Fair Lady.

But this wasn’t a solo show and I must tell you about Julian Ovenden’s divine ‘Finishing the Hat’ took me back to Paris 12 years ago when I saw him sing that same masterpiece in Sunday in the Park With George at the Châtelet. After that there was a blissful Ovenden-Errico duet on the regret-filled ‘Too Many Mornings’.

And a huge choir from Laine Theatre Arts in Epsom assembled to back Errico on ‘Somewhere’ from West Side Story, a show she said Sondheim hated because it was about gangs and he knew nothing about gangs. But ‘Somewhere’ he liked and so did we.

For the beautiful jazz piano of music director Tedd Firth, it was alone worth the price of the ticket, and ace Canadian jazz trumpeter Jay Phelps’ solos added a new dimension to the several numbers he was involved in. A word too for Chris Higginbottom on drums and Oli Hayhurst on bass, and that word is classy. As was the entire evening.

Such a pity it clashed with fellow American visitor Jeremy Jordan’s concert at the Royal Albert Hall just a couple of miles away. They make much the same sort of music and some of us would have loved to be at both.

Jeremy Chapman