Bio : Melissa Errico

 Melissa Errico is a Tony Award–nominated Broadway star, a celebrated concert and cabaret performer who has brought new elements of story-telling and thematic unity to solo performance, as well as a recording artist specializing in the music of Stephen Sondheim and Michel Legrand.  Called by Opera News, “The Maria Callas of the American musical theater”, her passionate and sublime voice moves elegantly between the worlds of theater, jazz, and the Great American Songbook.  
        Beginning her career as one of the celebrated Broadway leading ladies of her generation, she debuted as Cosette in Les Misérables when still only nineteen and then played the role of Eliza in the last Broadway revival of My Fair Lady, while subsequent roles included a legendary Venus in the Nash-Weil One Touch of Venus and Clara in Sondheim’s Passion.   Traveling the world to sing in recent years, from Singapore to San Francisco, her concert venues have included New York’s Carnegie Hall, London’s Cadogan Hall, and Le Grand Rex in Paris, where she was the only American invited to sing at the memorial to Legrand.  In summer 2023, she also performed a concert in Paris that was broadcast nationally and internationally on Radio France, followed by a sold-out cabaret at the historic Le Bal Blomet. Soon after, she opened for music icon George Benson at the Montreal Jazz Festival, where London Jazz News wrote: “Errico was energized, making sure with every breath that she would get the audience in the 3,000-seater Pelletier really on her side. Every high note was heroically held, and she got a standing ovation… Montreal audiences always want to show their warmth, and this one made her deservedly welcome.”   
          Yet it is Errico’s two acclaimed Sondheim recordings that have best  defined her artistry: her 2018 Sondheim Sublime was hailed by The Wall Street Journal as “the best all-Sondheim album ever recorded,” while  her second, Sondheim in the City (Concord Theatricals Recordings, 2024) — notably jazz-inflected and featuring drummer Lewis Nash — was praised by The New York Times as “a New York house tour of thrill and heartbreak.” Its release culminated in her sold-out London solo concert-hall debut in July 2025. 
     Over her career, she has also recorded with legendary producers Arif Mardin and Phil Ramone — the latter overseeing her album Legrand Affair, conducted by Michel Legrand himself. Beyond the recording studio, she has appeared in her own PBS television special as part of the acclaimed American Songbook series. Singing often with symphony orchestras across the United States, she was a longtime favorite of Marvin Hamlisch, with whom she frequently appeared in concert.
   In addition, she has created a role, unique among musical theater artists of her generation, as an author, writing a regular column in the New York Times about the life and misadventures of a ‘girl singer on the road’ called “Scenes from An Acting Life.”  Bringing that literary sensibility to the emotion and imagination of classic American music is central to   Errico’s newest album I Can Dream, Can’t I? a cycle of voice-and-piano reflections on illusion, memory, and the enduring beauty of the Great American Songbook.