Broadway star Melissa Errico fell in love as a child with the music of French composer Michel Legrand.
“My entire life, I was raised by a concert-pianist father who's obsessed with Michel Legrand. He’s a surgeon and a concert pianist and obsessed with Michel,” says Errico, who performs an all-Legrand concert Sunday evening at Broward Center for the Performing Arts.
Errico, who starred as Eliza Doolittle opposite Richard Chamberlain’s Henry Higgins in the 1993 Broadway revival of “My Fair Lady” and in 2002 headlined Legrand’s only Broadway musical, “Amour,” recalls the impact of his music on her family as she grew up in Manhasset on New York’s Long Island.
“The chemistry between my parents, when my father played Michel Legrand was how I learned about Michel Legrand. My mother got all romantic,” she says. “My family is very much defined by Michel’s score to ‘Umbrellas of Cherbourg,’” a 1964 French film musical that starred Catherine Deneuve and introduced the composer’s early international success, “I Will Wait For You.”
“My father served in Vietnam. While he was in Vietnam, my mother, right before he left, gave birth to my brother. He didn’t see Michael for two years. Their song – they were young married people – was ‘I Will Wait For You.’ That became the emotional soundtrack of the Vietnam war for many people.”
“I Will Wait for You” was nominated for a 1966 Academy Award and became a huge hit covered by, among others, Frank Sinatra, Astrud Gilberto, Bobby Darin, Tony Bennett, Connie Francis and Petula Clark.
Legrand would win the Oscar for Best Original Song with “The Windmills of Your Mind” from “The Thomas Crown Affair” (1968) and be nominated five more times in that category: "What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?" from “The Happy Ending” (1969), the title song "Pieces of Dreams" (1970), "How Do You Keep the Music Playing?" from “Best Friends” (1982), "Papa, Can You Hear Me?" and "The Way He Makes Me Feel" both from “Yentl” (1983).
He also won an Oscar and Grammy scoring the film “Summer of 42” in 1971 and received three other Grammys, including instrumental composition for TV’s “Brian’s Song” (1972) starring James Caan and Billy Dee Williams.
“The music is intoxicating. I don't know what it is. It’s my happy place. It’s the music I love the most,” says Errico, whose 2011 recording, “Legrand Affair: The Songs of Michel Legrand,” recently was reissued as a deluxe set with added tracks, including an intimate five-minute clip of them working together on the album.
Errico, 49, describes Legrand’s music as “the erotic meets the romantic.”
“Even as a young girl, seeing my parents just have fun, smiling and getting all funny in the living room, that music was like a keyhole I can look through into the whole adult life. I just knew something magical was going on.”
Errico’s career began while she was a freshman at Yale University in Connecticut, studying art history and philosophy. Interested in musical theater, she went to New York City in 1988 to audition for a Rhode Island production of “George M.”
“I had kinky curly hair. You could think Bernadette [Peters], you could think frizzy ‘80s. You could also very much imagine that I looked like a Victorian novel, though I didn't think of it at the time, I just had all this hair,” Errico recalls. “I was wearing tight shorts and tap shoes and I went into the audition for the Bernadette Peters part.”
The same day, Broadway director Richard Jay-Alexander was also at 1515 Broadway, down the hall casting the original national tour of “Les Misérables.”
“Richard saw me in the hallway with the hair and the tap shoes. He saw a young girl and it looked like Cosette to him – minus the tap dance,” she says.
Jay-Alexander invited Errico into the “Les Miz” audition.
“I put on a skirt, took off the tap shoes and I went in and didn’t know what they were going to ask. They asked if I could sing Cosette’s music. It was all very impromptu.
“Fortunately, I knew the music. I did fib. I didn't tell the truth. I pretended that I was learning it on the spot. I was a little disingenuous in that way. I wanted it to look miraculous, that I learned it so fast. So I sang ‘In My Life’ and learned it so quickly because I’m such a quick study,” she says, laughing.
“I cast her on the spot and I pulled her out of school. She thought I was exaggerating. She was brilliant, just brilliant, as Cosette, older Cosette,” says Jay-Alexander, a Miami Beach resident who has since traveled the world directing musical superstars including Peters, Barbra Streisand, Bette Midler and Kristin Chenoweth.
“Les Miz” took Errico away from Yale and on the road for 15 months. “She was a brilliant student and very good worker, and she was maybe one of the finest [Cosettes] ever because she just spilled it every night on stage in that last scene. Very beautiful to watch.”
After the tour, she completed her degree at Yale, then returned to musical theater. While starring in “My Fair Lady” during the early ‘90s, the Manhasset mother of a boy she’s known since nursery school saw a performance and set them up on a date.
Errico has been married 21 years to former tennis star Patrick McEnroe – younger brother of John McEnroe.
“It’s not the most obvious marriage because he’s not an intellectual and I was always with, like, old British men,” Errico says. “That was, like, my thing. If you were 30 years older than me and English, you had a shot.”
Errico and McEnroe – a sports commentator and director of his brother’s New York tennis academy – are parents of three teenage daughters, Victoria and twins Juliette and Diana.
Before they were born, Errico kept busy doing concerts, national tours and New York theater. In the early 2000s, she learned Michel Legrand had written a musical planned for Broadway and told her manager, who responded, “I know, I know, I love her.”
“I was, like, OK,” Errico recalls, still somewhat astounded. “She’s NOT my manager anymore.”
Errico went after – and got – the starring role in Legrand’s first musical for the theater, “Amour.”
They met on the first day of rehearsal. “I had his songbook. I brought his songbook to rehearsal. Well-worn already. And he signed it.”
Errico says that every day during rehearsal breaks, the French composing legend “never stopped fiddling at the piano.”
“And I knew the songs he was fiddling. So I would come over to the piano and just start to sing. The idea that he was in the room! We took such pleasure in each other. We laughed. Also, he wanted to get it right. I knew he wanted to get it right. He wanted a good musical.”
“Amour” flopped at the box office, closing at the Music Box Theatre after 31 previews and 17 performances. “He was heartbroken,” Errico says of Legrand.
The two reunited, joined by producer Phil Ramone, in 2005 to record “Legrand Affair” with a 100-piece symphony orchestra. The unmixed tracks remained unreleased while Errico had her children.
In 2009, she played the tracks for Jay-Alexander. “She came to my apartment and she played it for me,” he recalls. “I had a not-so-great reaction to it because, just to put it mildly, she was singing the orchestrations. Melissa feels things very deeply. This is a gift, but it's also a danger because you need somebody from the outside – everybody does – to be objective.”
According to Errico, Jay-Alexander “wasn't sure that the 100-piece orchestra wouldn’t be upstaging me.”
“That became something where we didn’t agree. Richard wanted to make it less loud, and make the orchestra more in the distance,” she says. “To tell you the truth, I thought about that and I knew that that was not what Michel Legrand was doing.
“He saw me as one instrument in this big ocean. It wasn’t that he was trying to squash me, but he liked the size. He was expressing himself in his mad, wild orchestrations.”
The finished album, finally released in 2011, was “kind of a compromise,” Errico says.
"I feel quite differently," counters Jay-Alexander. "We re-recorded every single vocal on that album and I don't feel it was a compromise at all. 'Legrand' stayed intact and Melissa's vocals were stunning, one better than the next. I'm very proud of my contribution to that record, especially being tied in even the smallest way to the late, great Michel Legrand and the late, great Phil Ramone."
Says Errico: “I said let the orchestra be grand and lush, and try to keep that Richard Jay-Alexander idea, so that the voice is somewhat close to the microphone. A big orchestra thing, but an intimate approach.”
The album contained Legrand standards including “The Summer Knows,” “The Windmills of Your Mind,” “I Will Wait For You” and “What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?”
Legrand, 86, died on Jan. 26, 2019. Two days later, The New York Times published an appreciation written by Errico, his late-in-life muse:
“[A] mix of wild energy and plaintive emotion governed Michel’s extravagantly well-lived life,” Errico wrote. “Music was urgent to him. Well, almost everything was urgent to him — try hailing a New York taxi with him, oh!, the impatience — and then at the piano, he was transformed, calm.”
After Legrand’s death, Errico paid tribute to him by re-releasing “Legrand Affair,” adding demo outtakes from the original sessions and one new recording, “I Haven’t Thought of This In Quite a While,” Legrand’s final composition with lyrics by his frequent American collaborators, Marilyn and Alan Bergman.
The reissue’s final tracks with Legrand are a “window into his talent and how he thinks,” Errico says.
“You hear in the six demos him talking to me, you hear how he plays and practices and thinks, teaching me and telling me to be more free. You can see me rushing and being a little jumpy, as I am. He’s teaching me to just let my mind go,” she says. “I’m not saying the making of ‘A Legrand Affair’ is of such great interest to anyone, but the making of Michel Legrand is of great interest.”
If you go
- What: Amour and After: Melissa Errico Sings the Music of Michel Legrand
- When: 7 p.m. Sunday, March 8
- Where: Amaturo Theater at Broward Center for the Performing Arts, 201 SW Fifth Ave., Fort Lauderdale, https://www.browardcenter.org/events/detail/amour-after-melissa-errico
- Tickets and information: $35-45; 954-462-0222; Ticketmaster, https://www1.ticketmaster.com/event/0D0057588EE8AE9D?brand=broward&camefrom=cfc_broward_web
WLRN depends on donors to remain South Florida’s leading nonprofit, most trusted source of news and information. Support our mission by giving monthly as a sustaining member of Friends of WLRN or make a one-time donation of your choice. Thank you. Click here to give.
