On this special episode of LUTV News “InFocus,” news anchor Stephanie Adeniji has an in-depth interview with actress, singer, and Broadway star Melissa... | By LUTV News | Welcome to LUTV News in Focus where we feature interesting topics on campus in the community and in the world of culture. I'm Stephanie Atinichi. Here at LUTV News, we do amazing things and one of those amazing things is having the opportunity to interview a Tony Award nominee. I had the chance to interview Melissa Errico who is a recording artist and film and TV actress. First off, I wanted to find to know what inspired you to get into music. I think I got inspired by music by my father. My father was a concert pianist, is a concert pianist and a doctor but he was very inspired by certain style of music, French music, French classical music. So, growing up in that house, I I heard what music could do. It really cheered my mother. It really brought people together. My father was a serviceman in Vietnam and he played music in the war. Um so, I think I I learned at home that music was something that would relax my mother and him. You know they they lived hard. They were Italian Americans. I come from an immigrant family. Um they didn't come from Italy but their parents did. So there was a little bit of a life is tough kind of attitude. In the you know just in their values and in the way they see the world. But then when they played music life was to be enjoyed. And life would you know so I watched all that happen. Hard work and music and pleasure. So I associated it to pleasure. And I Think I fell in love with certain styles of music at home and it's interesting because the style of French music that I love so much that my father would play Chopin and Ravel is actually the inspiring music, the inspirational music to the composer Stephen Sondheim that I'm going to be singing in Texas. So it's kind of interesting that that old music and that root music that's romantic and that's swirling and dreamy is also the music that affected the person that now I've become something of a dead dedicated muse or you know gal around town who sings tributes to Stephen Sondheim. So it was that style of music and it was my home where I first learned to sing. It wasn't church. You know it's often church for someone like Roberta Flack who's one of my heroes. She learned to sing from her parent but it was a church. In my house the piano was church in the living room was something like that we did go to church. Uh a really special and sacred experience. You know. And we did Christmas shows too. My father then once he saw we liked music my brother and me and my mom we would knock on doors and do Christmas shows in people's houses. So we always associated to having fun. You mentioned one of your heroes. Is that the person who you look towards for inspiration whenever you're writing music or performing? Well Roberta Flack is one of the greatest American pop singers in you know in history. I happened to have met her when I was young. Uh her song Killing Me Softly was one of the great tracks of my life you know strumming my face with his finger that you know the Fuji's ended up making that very popular. Uh I knew her when I first started on Broadway and my fair lady she was my teacher's student also. So I would turn to someone like her from time to time for advice about becoming a musician not just a singing actress. So in the space of my teacher's studio. I'd me a legend like that when I was young and she would say, make it your own. You know, learn, you know, you're an actress, you're exposed to music all the time but when you do your own concerts and you make your own music and you sit with the pianist, make it your own and then she'd sit at the piano and sometimes go into my lesson time and give me examples of that. So, someone like her touched my life a lot. At last on the ground you in mid air send in the clouds isn't it How did you juggle being an actress, a singer, an over an overall Broadway star with having a family? I think the best way to answer that is to not look too far ahead. I think if you have a goal focus on the goal, don't focus on what you want to become. Don't focus on how the whole year is going. Don't focus on even how the whole month is going. Just take everything step by step and day by day. I remember being in college myself and let's say there's a show and you want to be a Broadway actress someday sure you know but just if you got a job and if it's you to sing something you know or do a beautiful play or something at the in the cafeteria make it as good as it can be if that means borrowing somebody's pretty night gown to make it a gown picking up feathers at the drugstore do that so that you're the most terrific you know version of this glamorous person you need to be no matter what the situation you know in other words make the most of each step that you get and don't look too far ahead and certainly don't ever look down on an opportunity that you have. I've never thought something was below me to do. If it was a favor, if it was a charity, if it was a weird situation, I usually found something fun in it and that playfulness, I think is really important that you're always willing to go, okay, sure. You know, if somebody invites you to do something, I think become what I would call a yes person and the same thing with children, try not to look too far ahead even with who they're becoming. You just take them at face value. See what you know it can happen day by day. You just appreciate each each thing and and and never judge a situation too much. Just take it a moment by moment. So it was it's kind of a parenting idea as well that every moment is is is all you have so that way there's no don't look too far to don't look too far in advance you know and then there'll be less pressure my own kids you're you're a university girl and my own kids are looking you know they're in college and they're I mean they're in high school and they're thinking about college and I said you know let's not think about college let's think about what we like to do what interests us and then your college application will be honest and we'll be relaxed you know will be true it's not because I did this because it will look good for this in other words Don't do things for what they'll be. Do it for itself and enjoy the thing. Does that make sense? It does. Yeah. Nine times out of ten lady you are doing just fine. You've been doing this for so long, has there ever been a moment maybe when you're on stage performing and you just think to yourself, I cannot believe that I am living my dream right now. Oh yeah, those are wonderful moments where something really beautiful is happening. I can remember do you want me to remember just one or maybe just does that ever happen? Pinch yourself. Yes. I think Carnegie Hall last year was a big thing. I I was able to step out of the famous big doors stage right at Carnegie Hall. They're maybe 20 feet high and they open from the floor to the ceiling. So, when they they open, they're amazing and I was able to step out of those famous doors and sing from My Fair Lady and sing sing the music of Stephen Sondheim which I'm going to sing in Texas it was a real honor. I had to go out and find something you know really beautiful to wear. Cos that was pretty thrilling. So that was probably the the highlight of my life. Um and another one that was also related to Stephen Sondheim. I did his musical Sunday in the park with George. And I was thirty-two. I didn't have kids yet. And the show was so beautiful and I was in rehearsal. But I was in the costume and I just remember being there and I have a sort of had this hat on. I was a ghost. I was playing a character of a who was in a painting and she walks out of the painting and she's talking to a young person like you and giving advice about art. He's a painter and this musical is about about creativity and he's frustrated and would you believe it that the woman in the painting steps out of the painting and sings to him? And I just was standing there looking at the other actor listening to the orchestra, looking at the empty opera house or the beautiful theater at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC and the whole world stood still and I thought everything it's taken my whole life to get to this moment was worth it. Um that was just one of those moments where everything beautiful was happening. So I'll remember that. There's a couple other times. It happens. I'll tell you it doesn't happen that often. Um it doesn't happen that often. So you know you have to also be prepared for the grind you know. But those moments are are precious. And I think they're happening more often. Maybe now that I just something. I'll be I'm just made an album this summer last summer and released it. And the whole year but that summer July last year of making the record every day was fun. It was only three days but every day was fun. Oh I have another great experience. Same summer I opened for George Benson. The great George Benson. I can't believe. I mean I've been listening to his music since I was little. And I opened for him at the Montreal Jazz Festival. And it was the greatest experience ever. So there's like me five or six. I may have just said them all. And I probably have 10, 000 bad days you know. But but thank you for letting me feel all those nice memories. Of course. Um let's talk about your newly released album Sondheim in the City. So what inspired that album? Oh a lot of things. I'm so glad you asked. Sondheim in the City was inspired by the pandemic in some respects because I was thinking about New York City. Place where a lot of people with Theater Dreams and Music Dreams. You come to New York because it's the center of everything and you get here and I was watching New York historically changed. All the restaurants closed. All the theaters were closed for the first time in in history. It was quite shocking and when the city reopened, I was asked to do a concert and reopen a nightclub and I got to thinking about the city itself and it's the dreams that we bring there and the difficulties of New York but the vibrancy of New York and so I did a concert called Melissa Sings Her New York and it was all about the dreams of being a showgirl, my family, my the immigrants from coming to New York City, what they wanted, the life that they had. I got to thinking about relationships, the West Village, my being a funky artist, kind of you know, the little odd jobs that I had, days on unemployment, you know, jury duty, diners, hanging out, all the weird stuff that happens in New York City where you get into these deep conversations with people that you've never met in an elevator within seconds. You know, their whole life, you know, they're getting divorced. You everything. You know in just the eleventh floors you know everything. This could only happen in New York City to the way to the extent that it happens. So I got to thinking about all these curious brilliant aspects of New York and then the hard things and the disappointments we have. The reality checks. The and the difficult marriages that I've seen in the city. Um relationships restrained. It's intense. It's expensive. Um and anyhow all these ideas about New York City were very fresh because of the changes or around and then the renewal of New York City and then Mister Sondheim died. Um 2 years ago. So it was all at the same time. It was his his big birthday when he was 90 was on Zoom and every Broadway star was you know was participating in it. So during the pandemic we were celebrating him and then just as it was ending he died. And he loved New York. And he lived within 20 blocks of 20 square blocks his whole life. So he's a true New Yorker. So I got to thinking about these ideas of New York. And then I looked at his music and all his plays that were written in cities or in New York City and relationships, ambition, glamour. It's kind of like Sex in the City. It's like My Sex in you know remember the TV show Sex in the City. It's Sondheim in the City. It's Melissa starring in you know Sex in the City a little older and sassy and with his music. And it all works. His his music is all about ambition, excitement, vibration, ex the ecstasy of New York and the rough and tough sides of it. It's a worse and all kind of record. So that's how it happened. It it happened from a personal feeling but it also happened because this epic songwriter who's so funny, so brilliant, love New York too and I pushed the two feelings together, his love of it, his brilliant genius, and my fascination with it and I pushed them together and I've made this record that's really really exciting. I'm going to get to sing it a lot this year. It's pretty sassy. I sing it real real jazzy. I can sing it with guitar players and be kind of like a hippie girl. I mean there's so many different ways a city woman is. So I get to be all these city people in my imagination. So it's cool. Yeah it really is. Yeah it is cool. Let's also talk about your song Good Thing Going. Um is it a part of the album or is it going to be released separately? Oh no it's on the record. It's on the record. The record is out. It came out February 16th and I'm really proud of it and it was released on Concord Records which which is one of the biggest companies in the world and super smart people too. They love Sondheim. They just won the Grammy this year for Into the Woods which was a Broadway show and was big success. So, they're really really smart and they're really dedicated to Sondheim's career and genius and legacy as they say. So, They chose Good Thing Going as what you would call in you know if I were Taylor Swift my single is Good Thing Going. You know. It started out like a song we started quiet and slow with no surprise and then one morning I realize we had a good thing going it's not that nothing went wrong some angry moments of course but just a few and only moments no more because we knew we had this good thing going And I hope you really like it because we made a short film and I hope that your viewers will go and watch it. We made what they call a short well short or short narrative film or elaborate music video to tell the story of Good Thing Going. Good Thing Going was written for Stephanie Sondheim's New York musical called Merrily We Roll Along which is really interesting because it starts off the characters are my age and you know they still look good but they're all upset and they hate each other. One is an alcoholic. One got super rich and one didn't get it successful and the show moves backwards and every scene every 20 minutes or so goes back five years and you finish when they're 20 and they're in college and you see the dreams of who they wanted to be and you watch the show backwards and you know that of course when you get to the end, it's the beginning and you see how happy they were and how many dreams they had and you've already seen how bad it ends up It's very profound and Stephen Sondheim wanted you to see these three people who were songwriters and they wanted to have success as writers and make musicals. The interesting thing is that of course in the show, they fail and they hate each other and they're really struggling but of course, the musical we're watching is brilliant. So, a beautiful musical happened. So, it's really really profound that they they fail in the show but the show is amazing. So, it's very very touching but in the show, they write a song that they want when they're young that they want to have their first hit. They want to have their Taylor Swift first hit and the song is Good Thing Going and so Good Thing Going comes from a musical that's got all these cool things about it. Now, take it out of this the play. I'm an actress. I have my own record. I'm given this amazing song. I'm told you sing it great. Whatever. Thank you. Something. My record label loves it and they said, could you make a music video or something of that song? So, I think, okay. Well, I'm not going to like repeat The play because then we're just doing the play and I thought just what is the lyric say? The lyric says we had a good thing going. Going gone. We have like this great relationship. It's like it's it's a love story. We had something good. I wanted it to go farther and she says you never wanted enough. Alright tough I don't make that a crime. It's like being into a guy who's not into you as much. And so I thought okay he's not that into you as they say. How how would I make a video of that. So it's a love story and I hope you enjoy it because it's a it's my like little sexy movie about a relationship between an actress and I made it a director with my friend Rufus who's an another actor and he played a director and I think it's very touching. I cry and you know you see the relationship. You see how much she's crazy about him and then you can see that it's not going to work. So anyway so that's what that is. That's my single that we interpreted in the little film. Listening to you talk. It Sounds like you have an enormous passion for what you do. I mean if anyone ask you what's your favorite thing to do it's like you would never run out of something to say because you love it so much. So has music always been what you wanted to do or is it something that just you know happened because of how you were brought up at home? Well it's a good question. I I think things do evolve you know sometimes when you're you're you're a college student or a graduate student. College student. Oh student. So it I can't help but sort of relate to where you might be at in your in the way you're thinking. I had a dream when I was young which was like only to be an actress. Singing actress. That was like what I wanted. But I had other things that were interesting to me. But like I like art history. I like poetry. I was pretty good student. I liked travel. But I did want to be a singing actress. Then I did that a lot. I did a lot of Broadway shows. And I got burned a bunch of times. And sometimes I would say I need a break. And then I tried other in my life. And I was on television. I did film. You wait around a lot and you sit in trailers and you get really small parts if you're not like famous person right away. And I would sometimes think gosh I'm a singer you know. Now I'm like waiting three months to just say like ten lines you know in this thing and you live in Seattle in this little hotel and waiting and waiting and think gosh is this how I want to live my life? So the different steps along the way I'd change and had different chapters and then sometimes those chapters were sad because I was like this isn't me. And maybe becoming famous would be good for me but this isn't me My husband would say then let's not do it and then let's let's stop. Let's stop doing the LA thing. So it wasn't that I didn't want to do it. It was just the opportunities I was getting was not making me happy and they weren't using my full self. So yes I love what I do but I've always like I said you know I've read a book once It's called Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway. It's a wonderful book and it talks about how if you want to cross a river, sometimes you have to step on the stone and you're going left and then you step on the next stone and you're going right and then you step on step on the next one, you're going left and you don't look like you're going straight. You're literally going like over here and now you're going over here but eventually, you get to the other side. This idea that it's not always straight to get to something. So, so different chapters of happened then I did cabaret then I had a family then I did off broadway plays and I did more and more concerts and at some point as I in my early 40s I started to think maybe I should write a little more and I was writing essays in the New York Times and writing essays in little magazines mostly about how frustrated I was getting older or not getting a part or auditioning a lot or doing you know work that wasn't exactly right what I wanted like singing on cruise lines and I write about different things. So, at some point, I started writing my stories down because I was frustrated and sometimes when you write how frustrated you are, it's kind of funny to read. People like reading about how miserable you are or I'm frustrated. It's I know it sounds crazy but actually when you're hitting bumps, it's really interesting when you write it. It's awful if you just kind of be moaning about it but if you use it, you can actually write a cool play or a cool book or a cool poem or even a bummed out song, it's Funny how if you're creative you can sort of keep using what's truthful. So the bottom line is you know right now my life is more concerts and cabarets. I'm coming to your town. I'm coming to Texas to sing Stephen Sondheim's music. These plays I know with your great symphony at that beautiful concert hall. I'm going to get to do it and it's all the plays I've been in because I've been in three of his plays. I know all the well four actually. I've been and because I did into the woods. After the big three that I did of his as well. So I I know that a lot of these characters oh up close and personal and you know so now I'm doing concerts. If you had told me at your age that I was going to be like doing symphony concerts of Stephanie Sondheim specifically at in Texas with an orchestra I would have been like at your age I've been like what? I like a concert singer. You know like if I had to meet myself now I'd be like I would never have expected to meet you. Okay you meeting me like if I were you at your age and meeting me, I just been like, who are you? I just do not know who you are. My point is that you just keep moving. Don't worry too much, you know, about and don't be stuck, you know, like if one goal is like not working out, it might be as time to just just adjust the goal a little bit. So, to answer your question, yeah, I mean, I am excited and into it but I'm not at all sure I could have predicted the person that I've turned into. So, again, try to stay Shake it off. Shake it off. Shake it off. I think every day you should take your shoes off and you should walk barefoot and feel yourself in the ground. Shake it off. We're also busy getting fabulous. Shake it off and know you're good like yourself. You're interesting. Everyone is interesting for who they are. When I was young by the way, I used to have to hide that I was smart. It's you see, your generation has no idea because it used to be more like women were like I don't know there was a you know the whole story about like Gwyneth Paucho and the Harvey Weinstein and all the Me Too movement. You know all that. That we're that generation. We're that generation where we you know we didn't speak up. You know we didn't speak up about that kind of stuff. We didn't speak up. You know. So we're really happy now that you guys got everything going better. You know your generation says you know screw it. I need a mental health day and I just love it you know. So healthy. Yeah. Thank you so much. I really loved talking with you. You too. You too. Um any chance you're going to come to the show? Should I give you a one of my tickets? Should I get a few tickets? Do you think some people from your college will come? They might. Um but Depends because you know spring break people are going home. Ah they're going home. Well anyway we're going to get this out there and I hope some some folks who love musical theater and love Broadway and they're going to love this. This is a really dreamy show. Really Broadway. There's a song called I'm Just A Broadway baby. So anyone who likes sequins and beautiful orchestras in Broadway kind of glamour. We're going to bring it so thank you so much I really enjoyed something thank you really fun to meet you thank you for watching LUTV news in Focus to see more content from LUTV News follow us on X and like us on Facebook