Melissa Errico Explores Sondheim’s ‘Losing My Mind’ Ahead of Carnegie Hall Debut
The Amour Tony nominee explains in a personal essay how one word can affect a singer’s entire interpretation of a song.
Editor’s Note: On November 18, Broadway favorite Melissa Errico will make her long-awaited Carnegie Hall debut with the New York Pops in evening appropriately titled Broadway Blockbusters. Steven Reineke will conduct the famed orchestra for a concert that also features Broadway artists Nikki Renée Daniels, Jordan Donica, and Matt Doyle as well as Essential Voices USA, the latter led by music director and conductor Judith Clurman.
“This will be my Carnegie Hall debut on the main stage—I’ve sung happily on the smaller ones, but it isn’t quite the same,” Amour Tony nominee Errico tells Playbill. “So inspired by staggering respect for the place and occasion, I’ve been joyfully belting out songs all month while on the road.”
“I’ve been excited before by events—my marriage and giving birth to twins was pretty exciting—but singing at Carnegie is equal to any of it,” Errico adds. “I get to sing songs from classics from my past, like My Fair Lady and Sunday in the Park With George, and I get to sing them alongside the magnificent Nikki Renée Daniels, Matt Doyle, and Jordan Donica, conducted by brilliant Steven Reineke leading The New York Pops. What a thrill! I do feel a bit like Eliza—an Eliza with three teenagers, a husband, and two loving parents—and we are all going to the ball!“
Errico will also have the chance to wrap her soaring soprano around Stephen Sondheim’s “Losing My Mind,” Sally’s second act torch song in the groundbreaking Follies. In her essay below, Errico explores how one word of a lyric can completely alter an artist’s interpretation. For more information about the Carnegie Hall concert, click here.
Singers live for words. And, sometimes single words have resonance for us that transcend their normal meanings in ordinary speech. Tony Bennett once said—to me, as it happens—that you should always watch the way Sinatra lands the word “love.” I tell singing students to do the same with the word “light” when it comes up in Sondheim. The marriage of words and notes is our life, and as much as we want to hit the right B-flat, we need to know what the word means that it accompanies.
This month, I found myself in the middle of a series of arguments—quarrels, debates—all over the proper placement and choice of a single word in a single song I’m scheduled to sing at Carnegie Hall on Friday, November 18. All month, I’ve been belting out songs out in rental cars or humming to myself with AirPods on in airport lounges or while getting my 10,000 steps and taking in a local park in Singapore or London. (Rehearsals happen everywhere, the shower, the tube, the toilet—home, where I’d be surrounded by my library of biographies and music books.)