Amour & After: Melissa Errico sings Michel Legrand at the Crazy Coqs, London.
Star rating: five stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
With Melissa Errico you get the full package – a voice to die for like no other, a fabulous, sparkly blue dress she bought specially for the Crazy Coqs, an infectious giggle with all her storytelling and an obvious love of performing great songs.
It’s not just the voice, it’s the way she stretches words and phrases, the expressive use of hands and body that makes this Long Island mother of three so special, visually as much as vocally.
At times perching herself coquettishly on top of the piano, this superb stylist kept a rapt first-night audience enthralled with 90 minutes from the catalogue of triple Oscar-winning composer Michel Legrand (with a little bit of help from Cole Porter and Charles Trenet, two of his inspirations).
It was a long and glorious friendship that lasted from Errico starring in Amour, the Legrand musical, on Broadway in 2002 right up to the end of his life in 2019. That was the year the current tribute show was due in London but then Covid intervened. Well, the wait was well worth it.
Kicking off with Legrand’s most famous composition ‘The Windmills of My Mind’ from The Thomas Crown Affair – it won Best Original Song Oscar in 1969 – soaring and swooping, this was like no other version I’ve ever heard.
Informing us that the La France invented the love song, she employed a flawless French accent more than once, notably on Charles Trenet’s ‘L’ame des poétes’ – and in her encore ‘Dis Moi’, on which Legrand found an unlikely collaborator in the celebrated French novelist Françoise Sagan.
Moving on to Amour – the show lasted only 17 performances on Broadway – she said most Americans had only three French words in their vocabulary, Bonjour, Amour and Croissant – she laughingly recalled that one questioner thought Michel was a “her”! – and as they weren’t calling the show Croissant, Amour it had to be.
Taking ‘Other People’s Stories’ from the show and adopting her character Isabelle, glasses on, reading a magazine, the song relates how nothing happens to an ordinary girl like her so she has to fantasise about the scandals of “other people’s intrigue/other people’s sin, Why does David Niven/live with Errol Flynn”.
But, for me, it was the slow, lush ballads that showed Errico at her incomparable best, with magnificent accompaniment from James Pearson, the artistic director at Ronnie Scott’s, the pair working together – “our first date” – for the first time.
‘What Are You Doing the Rest of My Life’, ‘The Way You Make Me Feel’, You Must Believe in Spring’ and ‘The Summer Knows’, mostly collaborations with lyricists Alan and Marilyn Bergman, really lit up the 17-song set.
Also with lyrics by the Bergmans, ‘How Do You Keep the Music Playing?’, performed by Errico, the lone non-French singer in the cast, at the sell-out Legrand tribute concert at the Grand Rex Theatre on the night of the Notre Dame fire, was so moving that a verse is worth recalling here:
“If we can be the best of lovers
Yet be the best of friends
If we can try every day
To make it better as it goes
With any luck than I suppose
The music never ends”
As long as singers like the divine Errico are around to carry the torch forward, the music of Legrand, as with Sondheim, will never end. What a legacy those two giants have left behind.