Melissa Errico – I Can Dream, Can’t I?
TONY® Award-nominated Broadway actress, singer and author Melissa Errico (My Fair Lady, Dracula, Les Misérables) releases her new American Songbook album I Can Dream, Can’t I? – a nuanced and powerful view through Melissa’s own individual lens.
Accompanied by Tedd Firth on piano, I Can Dream Can’t I? features works by Loesser, Coleman, Ellington, Rodgers & Hart, Joni Mitchell, and more—songs that probe new emotional depths, shaped by Melissa’s years of interpreting Sondheim. Though many of the songs are familiar, even classics, they evade the usual categories of American music: the torch song, the ‘I want’ number, the patter-comedy turn, the wash-that-man-out-of-my-hair song. An intuitively discovered body of work, these are songs of conversation and reflection, songs that ask themselves questions privately, more than they declare their desires loudly and publicly.
Accompanied by Tedd Firth on piano, I Can Dream Can’t I? arrives as a collection of standards that are far from standard. Though many of the songs are familiar, even classics, they evade the usual categories of American music: the torch song, the ‘I want’ number, the patter-comedy turn, the wash-that-man-out-of-my-hair song. An intuitively discovered body of work, these are songs of conversation and reflection, songs that ask themselves questions privately, more than they declare their desires loudly and publicly.
The album consists of songs of self-reliance and self-reflection, often sad, even when the feelings resolve in equipoise. These tracks are drawn from what Melissa calls “the field of poppies from which sprang Sondheim’s opium.” Errico’s years singing Sondheim, in the ever-extended Sondheim project, have brought her a new and unusual delicacy with the standards. Her diction, her clarinet of a voice, and all the skill learned in the classroom of the self-conscious ironies and comma-bound contradictions of Sondheim are applied to rediscover the emotional resources of the American Songbook. The music originally comes from greats such as Frank Loesser, Cy Coleman, Duke Ellington, Peggy Lee, Van Heusen, Rodgers & Hart, Jerome Kern, Sammy Fain, Dave Frishberg, Dori Caymmi, and Joni Mitchell. Meanwhile, the original lyrics were penned by Carolyn Leigh, Dorothy Fields, Alan & Marilyn Bergman, Oscar Hammerstein, Johnny Burke, and more.
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