The Life and Loves of a Broadway Baby: Melissa Errico – Crazy Coqs

Melissa Errico brings her show The Life and Loves of a Broadway Baby to the Crazy Coqs, London. Picture: Danny Kaan

The Life and Loves of a Broadway Baby: Melissa Errico at the Crazy Coqs, London.

Star rating: five stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

Don’t you just hate it when you can’t find anything to criticise? Fair enough, there was the odd moment when things went slightly off-script but nothing fazes Melissa Errico, the Broadway Baby who can pretty well do everything brilliantly and is nothing less than a force of nature.

Singer (and what a singer), musical theatre and cabaret star, movie and TV actress, recording artist, New York Times columnist, author, public speaker, proud mother of three teenage daughters, wife of 25 years to Patrick McEnroe, the quieter brother of tennis rebel John. So much talent in one package – it’s enough to make mere mortals sick!

On a flying two-show, one-night visit to the Piccadilly cabaret room she annually adorns, Errico was on the way to performing with her French “soul sister” Isabelle Georges in front of a cathedral audience of 800 at the Lichfield Festival the following day. The Broadway star’s mesmerising 80-minute show will long stay in the memory.

Backed by the James Pearson Band (MD Pearson on piano, Graeme Blevins blowing a mean saxophone, Sam Burgess on bass and Chris Higginbottom on drums, Errico gave us a taster of her range, from unexpectedly jazzy versions of standards like ‘Wouldn’t It be Loverly?’ from My Fair Lady in a swinging mash-up with ‘My Favourite Things’ from The Sound of Music, to works by her two musical muses Michel Legrand – she’s a committed Francophile and had just worked n Paris – and Stephen Sondheim.

Naturally enough as the show was called The Life and Loves of a Broadway Baby, there had to be ‘Broadway Baby’ but even more personal was another Sondheim masterpiece, ‘Move On’ from Sunday in the Park With George (she played Dot at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC).

The mood switches in a heartbeat from playful – a witty new song called ‘I Can’t Speak French’ written especially for Errico by Marc Shaiman (and lyrics co-written with Adam Gopnik) to poke fun at the fact that while she can sing in near-perfect French, she cannot converse in the language – to serious.

A searing ‘The Windmills of Your Mind’, the beauty of the piece and the styling of it, tantalisingly stretching a line here and there, accompanied by almost balletic movement of hands and arms, left her rapt audience open-mouthed.

Before the French segment of the show, Errico wowed us with swinging, jazz-inflected versions of classics like ‘The Man I Love’, ‘Luck Be a Lady Tonight’, ‘It’s Alright With Me’ (with a stunning sax solo from Blevins) and ‘Summertime’, all had been part of her busy showbiz life, the British section of which began when she came to London at 18.

That was when when she got a job as a barmaid at a pub-theatre, the King’s Head. From then on she was hooked on a musical career and here she was, three decades later, back in London and loving playing ‘femme fatale’ for a few weeks while her girls were away at summer camp.

Legrand had such a big influence on Errico’s career – she was Tony-nominated for her lead role in Amour – that she duetted the title song with her guest, the best-known cabaret singer in Paris and, by Georges, wasn’t she terrific.

Errico told us how the French title of the show Le Passe-muraille (The Man Who Walked Through Walls) had to be changed for Broadway audiences. Legrand said most Americans knew only three French words, Amour, Bonjour and Croissant, so Amour it had to be!

As her solo, Georges did a fabulous version of a saucy Cole Porter number, ‘Si Vous Aimez Les Poitrines’ (from the 1933 musical Nymph Errant) that her great predecessor Liliane Montevecchi used to do rather suggestively. Georges is a startlingly good, very intelligent performer and I hope we see her over here again.

Errico and Georges had teamed up earlier for another Legrand number (about twins) ‘Chanson Des Jumelles’ and they were together again for the ‘You and Me’ finale (a Henry Mancini/Leslie Bricusse number) and decorated that with a bit of tap dancing.

Is there nothing this lady cannot do? By now you will have realised this wasn’t any old cabaret gig, but very special and an EVENT. Once again, this Broadway Baby simply blew us away.

Jeremy Chapman