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.