Interview: Melissa Errico's TWAS THE NIGHT AFTER CHRISTMAS Opens at 54 Below

Your show is called TWAS THE NIGHT AFTER CHRISTMAS. Nice title! What are some thoughts on your mind, on the days after Xmas?

That Christmas is over! Thank God!  I mean, I love Christmas – I have three daughters, now teenagers, though they still love celebrating… but the hours! I’m amazed the elves put up with it. I was up until two in the morning filling stockings and wrapping presents.

What are you singing?

My show begins with Streisand’s “Jingle Bells” and “Everybody Says Don’t” followed by a jazz version of “Favorite Things” with some new verses I wrote. 

Now, you’ll note I sneaked a Sondheim in there between a 19ththcentury classic – “Jingle Bells” was written to be a drinking song, not a Christmas song—and a Rodgers & Hammerstein—which was written to be a nun’s song and also became a Christmas song… slipping Sondheim in there, written to be a theatre anthem and which tonight I’m declaring a Christmas song… sort of like sneaking a glug of rum into the supermarket eggnog. Not that R & H are supermarket …but they’re sweet and Sondheim never is. Or not completely.

Are you feeling naughty or nice?

Ha ha! That’s one of the nice things about the night after Christmas. We don’t have to be happy!  You don’t have to be sweet every minute to everyone. The presents are unwrapped, the stockings are empty – well, mine are – the leftovers are always better than the turkey, and you don’t have to pretend to like your relatives.  (By the way, I’ve never understood why people are so curious about their ancestors when they’ve already met their relatives.) Last night, we had to be nice. Tonight, it’s over, Thank God. We can be a little acid, a little sexy, a. little crazy – a little true. No more wrapping. No more smiling at relatives.  From stories I’m hearing from friends… it sounds like it’s good to make room for some real fun – nothing forced. 

Is there a favorite song?

Well, I can think of one… since tonight we don’t have to celebrate the things that are supposed to matter, we can celebrate the things that really matter. The song “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” is just so beautiful … it was written in 1943 for the GIs who were stranded so far from home in Europe or the Pacific. But it’s become a song for any family that’s apart. My own amazing oldest daughter, Victoria, was away from us all fall in her first year in college – Duke! The only great college as good in sports as in the arts, perfect school for our family – and then…she came home! For Christmas. Now that’s a gift. To keep.

And you know what’s even better …she’s in the audience on opening night. From Duke to home to here!

She’s happily headed – I mean, she’s headed happily back to school, not happily for us – and I’ll have to live on the memory.

Memory is what happens next. Christmas 2024 becomes a memory today… 

True!  You learn that that’s what childhood is, that’s what Christmas is… a series of beautiful memories. I have the ultimate memory song in the show called “I Remember”… and it has the single strangest set up in the history of song set ups.  It’s Sondheim, of course – and it’s sung by a girl who’s spent her entire life locked inside a department store monastery – don’t ask – and so when she remembers the natural world, she does it all in terms of the department store objects she knows. And the only thing weirder than the song is that Steve wrote a special Christmas verse for the song for Babara Streisand that so far as I can tell has nothing at all to do  with the song.

And the moral of that is that songwriters – even Sondheim – do whatever Streisand asks.

And they should – have you listened to her book? I’m in the middle of the 48th hour and still fascinated.  

No doubt Billy will sing brilliant duets with you! You even won the Broadway World Cabaret Award for Best Swing Show. Are there any other collaborators?

Yes! Billy is the hero of it all. He makes everything so fun. He’ll do solos too. Plus, my friend Adam Gopnik is an essayist, a novelist, who writes something completely weird and unpredictable for the New Yorker every week – just recently, on the history of Saturn’s rings, and sometimes on the etiology of liberalism. He has the most capacious mind and heart you’ll ever encounter. But what he’s really good at are funny words.  So, what would it have been like if Sondheim had written Christmas songs? We have a special parody song. 

Are you doing any Hannukah songs? 

Oh yes! We are going to stake a little night-after-Christmas Hannukah moment. My Jewish friends in the audience – and all my friends are Jewish, this is the Broadway living room after all – will tell you that something really miraculous has happened this year. Christmas and the first night of Hannukah were the same night.

Do you have any special guests?

I have a special ingenue guest tonight, named Ava Arkin. And Alice Ripley is singing in the show on Saturday night. On Monday, pianist Andy Ezrin is debuting some new jazz winter music & we are livestreaming on Sunday. My pianist father is playing an encore on Monday. It’s a busy weekend and we will just keep that room lit up like a fire you keep adding logs to! We’ve got the love to keep you warm!! And some fashion surprises!

Anything else you'd like to add?

Just that for all of us, the light of love we light this time of year will turn out to be more powerful than all the darkness that encroaches on us.  I believe it will. We have to live in hope! And I do. Let’s make my final song — “The Best Is Yet to Come” by Cy Coleman and Carolyn Leigh — come true: before Christmas, on Christmas-- and after Christmas!!

---

Tickets to see TWAS THE NIGHT AFTER CHRISTMAS at 54 Below from tonight December 26th through December 30th at 7 pm are available on 54 Below's website.

To post a comment, you must register and login.