Interview: Melissa Errico's Valentine's Day Residency Returns to Birdland

Tony-nominated Broadway star Melissa Errico is coming back to Birdland Jazz Club for her third annual Valentine’s Day residency, running February 14 to 16 at 7 and 9:30 pm each night. The show is titled I Can Dream, Can't I? - Classic Songs For Valentines Day – though “many of the songs are familiar, even classics, they become intimate conversations and private reflections on romance and desire.”

The show features songs by Jerome Kern, Cole Porter, Duke Ellington, Irving Berlin, Joni Mitchell, David Shire & Adam Gopnik, Scott Frankel and more. Melissa will be accompanied by a jazz trio led by jazz pianist Andy Ezrin, ready to whisper and swing her romantic secrets and illusions.

Melissa has been singing jazz-inflected music in jazz clubs around the world since 1997, when she was the youngest person in history to sing at The Cafe Carlyle and made an acclaimed debut singing “New Standards” in a one-month residency accompanied by jazz legend Lee Musiker (Tony Bennett). After starring in Cole Porter’s High Society on Broadway that year, Melissa was signed by Blue Note Records impresario Bruce Lundvall and made her recording debut with Blue Like That, produced & arranged by iconic record producer Arif Mardin. Her recording debut was praised for its ethereal and eclectic sound, with “a conversational ease that is seductive” (The Washington Post) and “gorgeous.” (New York Times). She has made many albums since including two albums of Michel Legrand’s music and two of Sondheim, as well as film noir jazz. She has appeared regularly at Birdland for 20 years.

We spoke to Melissa about the upcoming show, Valentine’s Day, and more. 

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What's your favorite part of performing on and around Valentine's Day?

This is my third annual residency at Birdland! I love the room, and I love that it is a real jazz club. I know what musicians are the real deal… and I bring them with me!

My favorite part of performing all Valentine’s weekend—into the wee hours with late shows, too–- is knowing I give people… a place to be. Lovers can come (and they do!), and families can come, tourists came, and singles can come and just laugh and be free, and I’ll flirt with them, and the music will flirt and make everyone feel loved. It’s that kind of night. Early in my theater career, I played Venus in One Touch of Venus at City Center, and she was an aphrodisiac who could galvanize a room into life. I liked that about her— the goddess of love- she wanted people to kiss, to know that life is fleeting and love is what we will recall. Speak Low, right? But remember: the actual goddess of love in the Greek myths was in a love triangle with a crippled, earnest husband (Hephaestus), a hot but stupid beau (Mars, God of War) and was really in love with the poet, who got killed by a wild boar. She could very well be the saddest woman at the end of the bar. She can also be the life of the party. That’s love for you.

There are so many songs about love. How did you craft and narrow down the setlist for this show?

For this show, I have an incredible jazz trio, and we are going to walk around Love and see its many facets-- pain, joy, ecstasy, sex, spiritually-meeting, and the meeting of minds, bodies too, of course. This is music to make-out mentally by. We have found a collection of standards that are not standard. Though many of the songs are familiar, some even classics— some from the higher reaches of the theater ballad, some from the hit parade— I think they evade the usual categories. They are conversations, reflections, asking questions privately. Some are sweet erotic metaphors like “Dancing on The Ceiling” – has any lyric ever been more anti-dramatic than the incomparable Larry Hart saying “She dances overhead, on the ceiling/ near my bed/ in my sight/ through the night.” It’s a fantasy… and the fantasy doesn’t resolve into anything. It just floats. Someone said recently to me that I sing a torch song and like to turn it into a searchlight. I love that! We have some Gershwin for that.

Other songs draw from swinging Rodgers and Hart, Cole Porter, Michel Legrand (and some sassy unpublished stuff that shows the influence of his friendship with Jobim), and due to my funky and expressive pianist, Andy Ezrin (Madeleine Peyroux, Chris Botti) we travel into other terrain like Stevie Wonder, Hoagie Carmichael, Randy Newman, James Taylor and a sultry Patricia Barber, a contemporary jazz star (and composer) herself. Of course I will sing the title song “I Can Dream, Can’t I?” – a hip song from 1936 by Sammy Fain (from the musical Right This Way)- which is all about committing to our illusions (“For dreams are just like wine/ and I am drunk with mine.”)—and I will tease some of my favorite Streisand songbook material like “Lazy Afternoon.” I’m fascinated by her. I have been reading her book for a year and it’s still 1968. I have about 38 hours to go. Want songs from Broadway? I know we are doing “Lost in His Arms” (from Annie Get Your Gun), possibly my favorite love song at the moment. It brings to mind a tender kind of obsession and willing oblivion.

But for Valentines 2025, my show has no story, no information. (I’m playing against type!) It’s just songs of love. And I am not playing a role. I am not a femme fatale this time (two years ago at Birdland for Valentine’s, I did my film noir concert for ten performances…that was dark existential fun, all about mystery, fate, and entrapment.). This year, I’m just me— singing my heart out.

You've been married for a long time. Do you think that influences the way that you sing about love, at all?

Sure! Luckily my marriage has been very colorful, so I have a lot of inspiration there. I met my husband when I was 5 years old, which lends our love story an almost surreal element at times. Falling in love was fun and magical at times; happy. Also, I had no idea what the tennis world was, and he wasn’t exactly reading Oscar Wilde in the locker room. Our wedding (25 years ago) was the best day of my life. Somehow I felt very Italian. We have had so many joys and we have faced big challenges together too. We are fortunate that we agree on the big essential things in life— how to parent our three amazing daughters, and how to stay flexible. Patrick is the kind of person to always want a long dinner table full of family, candles, drinks, free-wheeling conversation. I’m deeply grateful to have his love and to love him. I also adore him for having the self-confidence to enjoy all the artists around me— music, fantasy, illusion, reality, creativity… Patrick is an athlete and, in a way, he lives in complete parallel to actors and musicians— we travel, we win, we lose, we regroup, we dream of something elusive (excellence, mastery, competition, in his case) and we chose it with some sense of mission and inevitability. My mission, my energy, is safe with him. Safety is the best foundation for the risks of art. I like feeling calm inside so I can explore from there.

(Note to reader: Patrick McEnroe is a former professional ATP tennis player, winner of the French Open, current broadcaster for ESPN and political contributor on CNN, News Nation and his own Sirius XM radio show) 

Aside from the songs you'll be singing in this concert, what have you been listening to lately?

Ella Fitzgerald Sings Jerome Kern (1963), and I always enjoy my friend Jane Monheit, like “In The Sun”. My daughters are all cool teenagers-- I’m amused that all three currently have hair down to their waist— and they keep me enthralled by their vinyls— Gracie Abrams is really great. I like “That’s so True.” And my own daughter Juliette is playing all the time and truly to hear her strumming and singing is about the biggest joy imaginable. (I’m pleased to say they can sing most Sondheim lyrics if I bust into singing.) I have been known to refer to my girls as The Three Graces after Greek mythology, in a time of such blooming.

What's coming up next for you after this show?

I have spent much of this year researching the early jazz and ragtime music of World War 1, and I have been commissioned to create a concert on this theme at the Kennedy Center for May 7th. It is called “The Story Of a Rose: A Musical Reverie on The Great War,” and has a storyline inspired by my immigrant family in the real-life Ziegfeld follies where much of this music was debuted. It has been a true thrill to work with the Doughboy Foundation in Washington DC and work to create a musical memorial to this “forgotten” war, looking at the early works of Irving Berlin, Kern and more. There are a lot of charming songs and spirited melodies, as well as masterpieces of the early American songbook. Some of these songs, and war poems turned to melody, have been explored by the likes of Nina Simone, so there are many ways to express the immense emotions of this time in history.

Is there anything else you'd like to add?

I have a few seeds being planted. That’s a hint you just won’t understand. And, I’m continuing my tour of Sondheim in The City, which we just performed in Vegas, Mercyhurst and the Kravis Center in Palm Beach and are going to do at Staller Center (3/22 for my joint birthday with Sondheim!), NJPAC (5/17), 54 Below (6/20-21), all culminating in my solo concert hall debut in London on July 12th at Cadogan Hall, with special guest Julian Ovenden.

My suggestion is: come to London, go to Wimbledon (even if you only sit outside on the hill, it’s so fun!) and come to my concert. I have dedicated so much of my life to singing Sondheim and it’s so special to sing at Cadogan, a bucket list item. I think the London concert is going to be one of the highlights of my life. After Valentine’s Day weekend 2025 of course!

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Tickets to Melissa Errico’s Valentine’s Day residency February 14 to 16 are available on Birdland’s website.

Find tickets to all of Melissa's upcoming tour dates, and her social media profiles, on her website at melissaerrico.com

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