Roughly ten minutes into her show, Melissa Errico tells us “Now I’m not going to sing all the clichés of the stage-struck New Yorker, but I guess I am going to be the biggest cliché of all, the hyper girl who comes to New York with dreams of being on Broadway. That is the only cliché, I promise.” She’s wrong about that—she renders every song and every piece of patter with so much sincerity and upbeat energy that it’s the opposite of a cliché. You might think Ms. Errico’s strongest asset is her beauty, meaning both sonic (those amazing chops) and visual (that face which, despite her own protestations in self-penned articles in the New York Times, would still empower her to play ingenue roles into her 50s) but in actuality, it’s her irrepressible enthusiasm.

Shortly after this line, Ms. Errico gives us a trio of what the late Sammy Cahn would have called “special lyrics”— what most of us call parodies—three iconic songs of the city outfitted with topical, pandemic-specific words by her frequent professional partner Adam Gopnik (still in his day job a mostly political columnist for The New Yorker). Yet even when singing “We’ve Lost Manhattan” (courtesy of Rodgers & Hart) or “What’s Happened to My New York?” (ditto Cole Porter), Ms. Errico can’t hide the smile on her face. Someone else might be dismayed by the masking, the vaccines, the proof-of-same cards, the boosters, or the ouch-y and sometimes grouch-y Dr. Fauci, but there’s no cynicism in anything that Ms. Errico sings. It’s as if the topsy-turvy events of the last two years have heightened, rather than diminished, her love for the city, and for music and theater.