“Do I Hear A Waltz?” At New York City Center Encores!
- Published
Do I Hear a Waltz
“Errico delivers an emotionally complex, haunting performance.”
– The Hollywood Reporter
New York City Center Encores!
New York, New York
May 11, 2016-May 15, 2016
The only collaboration of musical theater titans Richard Rodgers and Stephen Sondheim, Do I Hear a Waltz? tells the romantic tale of Leona Samish (Melissa Errico), a middle-class American woman who uses her meager savings for a long-dreamed-of trip to Venice, where she finds love, life, and her truest self. Featuring the ravishing music of a revered master and the sharp-witted lyrics of a genius coming into his own, this underrated 1965 musical has not been seen in New York in decades.
“Yesterday’s love goddess is looking lovelorn today. That’s not bad news, by the way. Because this same woman is wearing loneliness just as convincingly — and affectingly — as she once sported irresistible erotic allure. Melissa Errico, who dazzled New York in the otherworldly title role of the Kurt Weill-Ogden Nash musical “One Touch of Venus” in an Encores! concert production in 1996, has returned to the same stage 20 years later to demonstrate that she is equally at ease as an earthling. She is also providing a demonstration that time does not necessarily wither talent or presence…above all, there’s the transformative, delicate coarsening that Ms. Errico applies to become Leona…Nowhere is her skill more evident than when Leona sings the show’s title song. In concerts and cabarets, this number is often rendered as a wondrous paean to awakening love. But as sung and danced here by Ms. Errico, it becomes an excavation of a soul too practical, too earthbound to ever really take wing…It’s an exquisite interpretation.” – The New York Times, Ben Brantley