The Green Room 42 presented the return of Melissa Errico in “An Acoustic Evening with Sondheim & Melissa” to celebrate Stephen Sondheim’s birthday on Friday, March 22, 2024. After her scintillating show, “Terminal Ingenue,” Errico returned to the venue in a new one-woman show inspired by the New York songs of Stephen Sondheim, on his very birthday. Accompanied again by the masterly poetic guitarist JC Maillard, who hails from Guadeloupe and Paris, Melissa sings Sondheim the social observer — a writer whose every song has the quality of a great short story. The evening also featured Thierry Arpino on percussion. The set list was drawn from her Sondheim albums, including songs such as “Dawn,” “Broadway Baby,” “Can That Boy Foxtrot!,” “I Remember,” “Take Me to the World,” “Uptown Downtown,” “Good Thing Going,” “Anyone Can Whistle,” “Sorry Grateful” and “Being Alive.”

Interweaving Sondheim’s lyrics with passages from other great New York writers, Melissa sings the story of one imaginary New York woman. It’s the song cycle of The Sondheim Woman – greeting the Hudson by dawn, brooding on her decade of love and work, the many-sided heroine of Melissa’s new album, Sondheim in the City. Once an innocent Broadway baby, she’s now an experienced uptown-downtown lady – nursing a sorry/ grateful marriage, and maybe even a secret foxtrot or two. With her signature mix of sexy singing and smart talk, Melissa offers a kind of parallel new musical of Sondheimiana, with songs, familiar and unfamiliar, seen in new sequence and in a new and poetic mood.