In late 2021, musical theater giant Stephen Sondheim passed away at 91, leaving behind one of the most imposing catalogs in all of the Great American Songbook canon.
Imposing, that is, unless you’re Melissa Errico. In 2018, the Broadway star released an acclaimed album of Sondheim covers, Sublime Sondheim, that was hailed by one critic as “the best all-Sondheim album ever recorded.”
As she told Billboard around the release of that album, Errico enjoyed a pen-pal correspondence with Sondheim during his lifetime — but knowing the guy and tackling his dense catalog are two entirely different things, and one suspects her knack for interpreting Sondheim has less to do with insider info than it does their shared love for the sprawling, frustrating metropolis of New York City.
NYC – Manhattan in particular – is the focus of Errico’s new album, Sondheim in the City, which rounds up Sondheim tunes (including a couple of songs written for but cut from classic musicals) that meditate upon the frenetic, magnetic madness of the city and its compelling, anxiety-riddled residents.
Sondheim in the City is out Friday (Feb. 16), and with it comes a short film for her version of “Good Thing Going” from his magnum opus Merrily We Roll Along. Drawing on Annie Hall (her fashion certainly takes a cue from Diane Keaton’s Oscar-winning role) and French new wave, the “Good Thing Going” mini movie reflects on the dissolution of a romance between an actress and her director. Errico’s phrasing imbues the tale with the bittersweet sense that perhaps this relationship was bound to fail from the start — but still worth mourning.
“The album is a kind of palimpsest of Sondheim writing about the city, mostly in the ‘70s and ‘80s, and our living —my living — in the city right now in the post-pandemic time when I recorded the album. In a way, I’m conjuring back time in order to fall back in love with the city,” Errico says of the album. “Sondheim is my New York, and his is the city of my dreams. I used all these songs to make a Sondheim musical for myself — partly my life, partly his mind. He is one of the enduring poets of this complex city, and I walked into one poem after another.”
Errico is well-suited for singing about the city, having lived out two seemingly disparate sides of the New Yorker identity. Although she was born in Manhattan and has deep roots in the city (her great aunt was a breakout star among Ziegfeld girls back in the Jazz Age), her family moved to Long Island before too long. Errico has been the toddler playing in Washington Square Park and the teenager yearning to escape to Manhattan – so she may know the score in ways only native New Yorkers seem to, but she’s also experienced the desperate drive to pick up and move to the city that drives so many transplants to make New York their home.
Check out “Good Thing Going” above and the album here. Errico is currently in the midst of a superbly entertaining residency at Manhattan’s famed Birdland Jazz Club through Feb. 18 with the Tedd Firth Quintet.
