The outstandingly talented Melissa Errico, has some London concerts coming up July 10 & 13 at Crazy Coqs with the fabulous French singer Isabelle Georges.  The show will include some songs by her close friend and collaborator, the late Stephen Sondheim.

Errico has also recently released a second album featuring the music of Sondheim whom she had a close relationship with, regularly corresponding with him in the years leading up to his passing. 

This interview explores Errico’s experience of working with Sondheim, her upcoming concerts and her new album.

LPT: LPT magazine reviewed your last show at Crazy Coqs with much admiration for your superb voice, sonorous and sometimes sultry. (Five stars from us). We’re very interested to know more about your history with Stephen Sondheim. How did it all begin?

I met Sondheim when I was cast in the Kennedy Center Sondheim Festival production of SUNDAY IN THE PARK WITH GEORGE. Raul Esparza played George. I was Dot. I’ve told this story many times but it’s true – I was so young and so impassioned by the play that I suggested a change in the script, so that Dot, instead of primping by her mirror, was naked in the bath as she got ready for her date night with George. I thought that it would heighten her vulnerability to hurt and, as an art history major in college, I knew that Impressionist painting was packed with nude women in baths. I didn’t quite understand that this was…Sondheim…and you didn’t just gaily make suggestions to improve the show. But – this was Sondheim, a collaborator, and he liked the idea and was open to making a few minor lyric changes. So that’s how we began – me impudent and bare and singing in the bath

LPT: Sondheim is known as a great teacher, what did you learn from him?

Specifically? I learned the perpetual mentor’s lesson – that every detail matters and counts. During the Sitzprobe of PASSION, he insisted that I “sing the silence” in lines with apostrophes: Couldn’t, Wouldn’t…all of those – so that the audience would hear the apostrophe and not just a blur of sound. He was being playful, but serious too. I also learned that one can be generous and firm at the same time, as he always was. In recording, he always wanted me to sing the song he wrote, and then feel free to become a ‘girl singer’ and take a few jazz liberties. And of course, the wisdoms within his songs are what I live by.