Broadway Star Melissa Errico Will Present “The Story of a Rose: A Musical Reverie on The Great War” a Scintillating Evening of Song and Story at the Rachel M. Schlesinger Concert Hall
Interview with Melissa Errico
By Jordan Wright
April 18, 2025
Melissa Errico’s Upcoming Show
The Story of a Rose: A Musical Reverie on The Great War will star Melissa Errico in a world premiere performance on May 7th for one night only at Alexandria, Virginia’s Rachel M. Schlesinger Concert Hall and Arts Center. In a unique mix of song and speech of the period, Errico relates the story of the oft-overlooked epoch of World War One in all its complexities. Produced by The Doughboy Foundation the concert benefits its work in support of America’s National World War I Memorial in Washington, D.C. The show is also presented by the Gary Sinise Foundation. Established by actor and humanitarian Gary Sinise to honor our nation’s defenders, veterans, first responders and their families, the organization creates and supports original programming designed to entertain, educate, inspire and support these heroes.
As an actress, recording artist and writer Melissa Errico has been called, at her Carnegie Hall debut in 2022, “a unique force in the life of the New York theater– there’s no one quite like her!” A Tony-nominated actress for her mentor Michel Legrand’s “Amour” on Broadway and star of such Broadway musicals as “My Fair Lady”, “High Society”, “White Christmas”, “Les Misérables” and other smash hit shows, she has come into her own in recent years with concerts and cabarets, touring the world in productions that spin together a vital and witty script with her sublime voice that had Opera News dub her “the Maria Callas of American musical theater.” The songbooks of Stephen Sondheim and Michel Legrand, among others, have been the subjects of her solo concerts. Her 2019 album “Sondheim Sublime” was called, by the Wall Street Journal, “The finest solo Sondheim album ever recorded.” Currently, Errico is touring her new album, the acclaimed “Sondheim in the City” – that will culminate in her London solo concert hall debut at Cadogan Hall on July 12, 2025.
Melissa Errico (Photo/Michael Hull)
She has also recently appeared as Mrs. Patrick Campbell in the play “Dear Liar” at the Irish Rep and premiered the role of Eleanor of Aquitaine last fall in an unforgettable concert at the Metropolitan Museum’s Cloisters, singing a new David Shire/Adam Gopnik musical penned expressly for her. Errico writes regularly about the comic twists and turns in the life of a performer for The New York Times in a series dubbed by the newspaper “Scenes From An Acting Life”.
From Paris, where she appeared last summer with her frequent concert mate Isabelle Georges at the Bal Blomet, to London, where she is a regular at Crazy Coqs cabaret – from the Elysée Palace to the stages of the Grand Rex, Montreal Jazz Festival and Carnegie Hall – she brings her inimitable mind, spirit, voice and soul to audiences around the world.
This orchestral one-woman concert, enhanced with evocative visuals, ravishing period costumes, and an all-star jazz ensemble is a stylish and deep reflection on World War I. Using her own great Aunt Rose as her avatar, and the Ziegfeld Follies that Rose starred in as a frame, Errico recreates the songs, hopes and loves of the people of the time. Additionally, acclaimed Broadway actor/musician George Abud (Lempicka, The Untitled Unauthorized Hunter S. Thompson Musical, The Band’s Visit) assists in a variety of onstage roles.
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What drew you to this subject matter? Are you a history buff?
As an art history major, I love doing historic recreation on stage. I’ve played Jefferson’s epistolary lover Maria Cosway in a play, and most recently Eleanor of Aquitaine in a new musical by David Shire and Adam Gopnik. So, when Dan Dayton of the Doughboy Foundation approached me about creating a work on stage with music about the Great War, I leapt at it.
Tell me about your Aunt Rose as your inspiration for this new work?
My Great Aunt Rose was a kind of presiding mysterious figure throughout my childhood. She was a Ziegfeld Follies girl of extraordinary beauty and glamour and I recall her red lipstick and constant cigarettes. She was an Italian immigrant newly arrived in the United States when the war began, so she seemed the perfect heroine for our story. Of course, I’ve reworked her story for dramatic purposes, but her essence is true. She was one of that generation of immigrants to America who sought out opportunities. Fortuitously, she was discovered by Ziegfeld in a subway restaurant, and he made her a star. Later she faced tragedies that often come with sudden stardom – the wrong men, the wrong choices and never enough money. The life of a Follies girl was no longer than the life of a rose.
Aunt Rose in Feathers
Where else will you be performing this?
Dan Dayton plans to make it a permanent touring show, so I’d be delighted to take it anywhere that will welcome us. New York, of course, is always the ultimate destination for a show girl of any generation.
What are your plans for promoting this? Are they filming it? Will you be televising it? Touring college campuses?
I’ve been so consumed with creating the show that I haven’t focused on its extensions, but I do hope they make a record of it – live stream or permanent video – and of course I’d go joyfully to any college that wants it, and us.
Melissa Errico
How did you first get into performing? Who were your earliest inspirations?
On my twelfth birthday, my parents took me to a Broadway revival of “On Your Toes”, the Rodgers & Hart show. By intermission I was weeping. It was so compelling. I hardly realized it was a musical comedy – it was just a dream world I needed to enter, like Alice in Wonderland. “Who are these people?”, I demanded of my mother. “How did they get up there?”. I wasn’t being facetious. I needed to know. In a sense, the rest of my life has been about answering that question.
How old were you when you knew this was what you wanted to be?
At 12 I started going to a summer theatre camp, where I got to do one musical after another. I remember being in a student production of “Bye Bye Birdie” and the audience, including my father, a classical musician, was struck by my singing. I discovered I was pretty good at it. So, by the end of my teens, I knew exactly what I wanted to do, and set out to do it. By my early twenties I was already on Broadway. Early success of that kind is both a blessing – you find out what the real thing is like – and a kind of cautionary tale. Throughout my career I’ve found new paths and a desire to include different musical genres.
Melissa Errico
What is it about the American Songbook that you love so much?
It’s funny – when an opera singer like Renee Fleming, sings Schubert or Verdi or whatever, nobody asks them why they like performing that music, or implies that it’s ‘nostalgic’. It’s just part of the musical heritage of humanity. I feel that way about Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern and Cole Porter and Rodgers & Hart and all the rest of the great Broadway songwriters. It’s just great music with wonderful lyrics.
Yip Harburg, whose words I love to sing, once notably said. “A song is an idea turned into an emotion.” When I sing his music or those of other great artists, I sense I’m living in a world of feeling and in a world of wit. That combination brings meaning to my life and, if it’s done right, communicates with an audience of any age or background. Some of my best concerts of American classics have been in Singapore. There’s been nothing like it. I remember reading that the great theater critic Kenneth Tynan once said that people just had to recognize that in the middle of the twentieth century the great European musical traditions had emigrated to America and become the music of Broadway and Tin Pan Alley. I think that’s true.
What drew you to Steven Sondheim and Michel Legrand?
They were the two mentors of my musical life. Sondheim for me is the greatest of the great American songwriters – the most musically complex, the most emotionally intricate, the most demanding, and the most rewarding. I’ve done two Sondheim recordings now – he helped enormously with the first while he was still alive – and I know I still have more Sondheim inside me. Working with him, and for him, on a series of shows – “Sunday in the Park with George” and “Passion” – is still the highlight of my theatrical career. Since I was a girl, Michel had been a part of my life, though he didn’t know it. His music became the seduction music in my household. It’s what my father played to entice my mother. I starred in his one Broadway musical, “Amour” and after it closed, he insisted that we do an orchestral record, which became “Legrand Affair”. Michel was one of those uniquely creative people, I’ve only known one or two, whose art just poured right out of them, unspooling before your eyes. You had to stop him before he forgot the music he had just made! They couldn’t be more unlike, Steve and Michel, the arch-sophisticate gay New Yorker and the ingenuous French jazz lover, one acidic and the other ardent. But I loved them both, still do. I suppose they capture the two sides of my own character, intellectual and romantic.
Melissa Errico Performing
How do you juggle motherhood and traveling?
It’s a constant struggle, as for any mother. I did an essay for The New York Times about being a ‘girl singer’ on the road that tried to capture some of the contradictions. Sondheim wrote about it in the song, “The Glamourous Life!”. It isn’t.
I adore my three daughters – the oldest one is now at Duke University. The twins are getting ready for their own leap away from home. They’re the greatest joys of my life and they lift my heart with their laughter and love and beauty every time I see them. Of course, I worry about being away from them, but I pray that giving them the model of a woman fulfilled by her work makes up for sometimes having to say goodnight on FaceTime.
Melissa Errico with her family
Do you accompany your husband Patrick McEnroe to the tournaments?
When the girls were little, we always made Wimbledon a family holiday. As ‘Mayor of the U.S. Open’, that tournament has become a family event as well. I’ve learned so much about competition, discipline and resilience from being absorbed into his tennis world.
What was it like to go to the Palais in France for a dinner with the President of France?
That was one of the epic moments of my lifetime. It shows you what a girl from Manhasset I still am, that when the invitation arrived to have dinner with the President of France at the Elysée Palace, I wrote back to make sure I was invited. I thought there must have been some mistake, but they couldn’t have been more welcoming or charming. I got to dress up and pretend to be a French aristocrat out of “Liaisons Dangereuses”. I love France and sharing a summer performance date in a Paris cabaret with my friend and frequent partner Isabelle Georges (another Michel protégé) has been one of my most treasured shared occasions.
Melissa Errico at The Palais in France
On May 7th 2025 at the Rachel M. Schlesinger Concert Hall and Arts Center, 4915 East Campus Drive, Alexandria, VA 22311. For tickets and information visit – https://thedoughboyfoundation.ticketspice.com/the-story-of-a-rose-a-musical-reverie-on-the-great-war
