Tony Award-nominated Broadway star & singer Melissa Errico will be returning to London in November to celebrate the recent release of her new album Out of the Dark: The Film Noir Project.
A masterly-crafted 17-song cycle telling a complete story of hope, despair, and hope renewed. “The Maria Callas of American musical theater,” as Opera News has called her, referencing both her crystalline voice and dramatic, expressive intensity, and first known for her starring roles on Broadway including My Fair Lady, High Society, and Les Misérables, Melissa Errico is a Tony Award-nominated actress, singer, and author who contributes regularly to The New York Times.
Errico will offer Crazy Coqs/Live at Zédel a seductive suite of Noir songs, ranging from 1940s movie music (David Raksin’s “Laura”) to contemporary extensions of Noir, with new songs by Patricia Barber & David Shire, a world premiere song by Michel Legrand, and classics like Arlen & Gershwin’s “The Man That Got Away,” Oscar Levant’s “Blame It On My Youth,” and the mischievous Harry Warren gem “Checkin’ My Heart.”
Also included are Cy Coleman & David Zippel’s “With Every Breath I Take” (from the Broadway musical, City of Angels), Dietz & Schwartz’s “Haunted Heart” (1948), Lionel Newman’s “Again” (1948).
At the height of the pandemic in 2020, when the world was locked away in lonely rooms with only old movies to watch at midnight, Errico suddenly returned to one of her life-long obsessions – noir! The genre is noted for its dark, disturbing sensibility of intractable fatalism that Paris existentialists discovered in American film during the 1940’s.
Noir continues to run as a mesmerizing, mysterious current through modern movies and music, and Errico has embraced it in her own artistic endeavors.
Audiences can celebrate with Melissa and the sexy, swinging music of voluptuous fatalism & doomed love, of smoky nightclubs & lonely hotel rooms—a sound that came to life in American movies of the forties, passed on to the world as a permanent emotional field. With her trademark sexy smarts, Errico is tonight’s femme fatale, feeling her way through a night-lit world of uncertainty & mischief— Out of The Dark luxuriates in a darkness reminding us of the light that love can bring.
Melissa Errico is at Crazy Coqs 1st – 3rd November 2022.
