Melissa Errico talks about 'Let Yourself Go' at Bay Street

Melissa Errico has never forgotten the sage advice she got from Tony Bennett many years ago when the two performed together.

"He said to me once, 'Only sing the good songs, Melissa.' I try to," she said.

In fact, the Manhasset native has made a career out of it, whether performing on Broadway in "My Fair Lady" and "Irving Berlin's White Christmas," touring in "Les Misérables" and recording albums like last year's "Out of the Dark: The Film Noir Project," which featured scorchy and torchy numbers like "Laura" and "The Man That Got Away."

Classics from the Great American Songbook — including Errico's anthem "The Lady Is a Tramp" — will make up the playlist for "Let Yourself Go," her Aug. 21 show at Bay Street Theater & Sag Harbor Center for the Arts, which will also feature Roslyn Heights-raised songwriter Stephen Schwartz.

Errico, 53, recently spoke about the concert, her show-biz family and her plans for a Stephen Sondheim trilogy.

Your show is called “Let Yourself Go.” Is that a nod to Ginger Rogers and those great old movie musicals?

Yes, indeed. I love the classic songs and the classic singers and Irving Berlin’s songs — he wrote that one for, yes, [Fred] Astaire and Rogers in “Follow the Fleet” — are ones I sing to my own daughters. “How Deep Is the Ocean?” was their lullaby for years. But I also was motivated by the desire, after a few years of singing "‘significant" material, to make a show that would be pure fun — just silly, sexy, beautiful, sing-your-face-off fun.

The tone of this one sounds lighter than your last show on Long Island, which featured music from film noir. What made you decide to shift gears for this one?

I wanted to make a summer show filled with summer sounds. I love my noir set and continue to perform it whenever I get the chance — I did it for nine shows at Birdland last spring, and to my amazement sold out every show. I naughtily once compared my noir set to a special set of black lingerie that a girl took out only for a special lover. But noir reflected the angst and mystery of the pandemic, and I want to make my audiences this summer swoon with joy instead of trembling with recognition.

You recently did “Dear Liar,” about the correspondence between George Bernard Shaw and Mrs. Patrick Campbell, at the Irish Repertory Theatre. How did you feel playing this real-life character, especially one that many people today might not be familiar with?

I loved every minute of that process. I may overidentify with all my parts — it’s the actors dilemma, to borrow a phrase from Shaw — but Mrs. Pat was a particularly good match. She was smart, articulate, a natural writer, and she suffered all the indignities that beset actresses: condescending critics, belittling producers and brilliant authors, like Shaw, who inspire actresses into believing in their own potential greatness and then ignore them as they run off on their own little egocentric errands. Mrs. Pat endured them all and triumphed in her way. I loved that show, loved working with David Staller, who played Shaw, and Charlotte Moore, my stage mentor, and would love to do it again.

 

You still perform regularly on Long Island. What is there about Long Island audiences that makes them special?

I suppose part of it is that on the one hand they’re very sophisticated and knowing, having grown up right on the fringe of the world’s greatest cultural city, and at the same time very yearning and reaching. When I sing on Long Island, I recall myself as a young girl, in a state of quivering excitement taking the train into Manhattan with long-sought tickets to hear “A Chorus Line” or “Me and My Gal” — and then eventually to audition for shows myself — and I try to sing to her.

Was your grandmother’s career in the Ziegfeld Follies instrumental in your desire to be a performer?

My great aunt Rose, actually, who was an honest-to-God Follies girl discovered by Flo Ziegfeld himself in Childs Restaurant. She never sang, though she was in the first production of “Show Boat." She just had to stand there, beautifully. My grandmother, her sister, was a singer and a fine one, though she was never allowed to sing professionally by her husband. Their story, and those two kinds of enforced feminine silence, were the subject of my one-woman show “Sing the Silence,” which I hope to revive someday soon.

What projects do you have coming up after the concert?

I have a new album recorded over the spring that I’m very excited about — it’s Sondheim, of course, and the second in a planned Sondheim trilogy that may be my “legacy” work. But I won’t quite yet say how and which Sondheim. And then, more than anything, I’m trying to turn my many pieces for The New York Times — which they were proud enough of to group under a single heading “Scenes From an Acting Life” — into a memoir. I keep promising this to my friends and readers — and to my editorial mentors — but this year I really will disappear into an ashram or a literary retreat somewhere and do it. Even if it’s a movable ashram dispersed among a hundred airplanes and nightclubs.