Interview: Melissa Errico brings THE STREISAND EFFECT to Provincetown Town Hall

Singer, actress, and author Melissa Errico – who will perform her concert “The Streisand Effect” as her debut at Town Hall in Provincetown on August 23 – says she first became aware of Barbra Streisand when, as a teenager, she saw “Yentl,” the 1983 movie musical co-written, co-produced, and directed by, and starring, the show business icon.

“I missed her 1960s and ’70s period because I hadn’t been born yet, or I was just too young, so ‘Yentl,’ with its score by Michel Legrand and lyrics by Marilyn and Alan Bergman, was when I knew that there was something amazing coming into my ears and that her sound was just incredible, My father is a concert pianist – as well as a Vietnam veteran and an orthopedic surgeon – who plays beautifully. He plays a lot of French music, and he loves Michel Legrand, so when he brought home the ‘Yentl’ songbook, I was knocked out by Streisand and the music,” recalled Errico on a recent Zoom call from her home in New York.

“She seemed to belong to an entirely different artistic universe – not Broadway exactly, not pop music, but something that felt like pure art. That, in my mind, has always set her apart. As I grew older, I realized she doesn’t just sing songs, she reinvents them. She gives every lyric its own point of view. She carries ideas inside the sheer beauty of her sound so that thought and emotion became one. As a young actress, that fascinated me because I discovered that songs could be acted, not just sung,” explained Errico. “That realization has stayed with me throughout my career.”

For Errico, that career has included Broadway shows like 2002’s “Amour,” for which she received a Tony nomination for Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Musical, “One Touch of Venus,” “My Fair Lady” opposite Richard Chamberlin, “High Society,” “Anna Karenina,” and “Irving Berlin’s White Christmas.” Errico has also released several highly praised albums including “Blue Like That,” “Lullabies & Wildflowers,” “Legrand Affair,” “Sondheim Sublime,” “Out of the Dark: The Film Noir Project,” and her latest album, 2026’s “I Can Dream, Can’t I?”

As Errico’s career has evolved, she has worked with many artists who have also been important to Streisand, including Legrand. In addition to starring in his sole Broadway show, “Amour,” she later collaborated with Legrand on her 2011 album “Legrand Affair” (reissued in a 2019 deluxe edition), which the French composer conducted and arranged.

She also worked with Stephen Sondheim – who contributed seven tracks to Streisand’s bestselling “The Broadway Album” in 1985 – starring in a 2013 Classic Stage Company production of Sondheim’s “Passion” and doing two of her own albums of his music, 2018’s “Sondheim Sublime” and 2024’s “Sondheim in the City.” Errico has performed “Sondheim Sublime” concerts at Guild Hall, Wolf Trap, Ravinia, and elsewhere.

“After the pandemic, when I did that show in New York, it hit a nerve with audiences and became successful. Then in November 2021, Sondheim died,” says Errico. “I then thought, well, wow, this whole concert, everything about “Follies,” and my ancestors who were in the follies, will have to continue without him. It had meant a lot to me that he was always so interested that I have a whole Ziegfeld history in my family.”

The passing of Sondheim at age 91 in 2021, following the 2019 death of the 86-year-old Legrand, shook Errico. “I had gotten close to Steve and Michel, and when they died it was like both of my North Stars were gone,” she says. “It was when I was doing the Sondheim concert that I got introduced to Randy Waldman, who's been Streisand’s pianist and conductor since 1984.  About four years ago, when I was first going to Randy's house, he would say, ‘Let's put it in her keys.’ He did just that when we were working on ‘Send in the Clowns’ and it sounded great. Then, when we did some Christmas concerts, we added ‘Evergreen,’” which Streisand cio-wrote with Paul Williams.

The rewards of working with Waldman are many according to Errico. “When I’m in his house, I’m surrounded by the platinum records they share, and letters she has written to him. When he plays the piano, you can hear what he sounds like when he accompanies her. It’s not like normal playing – it’s more like a record. Your brain goes, ‘What is that?’ It's a high level of artistry and beauty, like this Hollywood kind of gorgeous.”

Waldman isn’t the only one in Streisand’s professional inner circle that Errico has gotten to know professionally. “Like Barbra, I was very close to both the Bergmans and was in touch with them often in their later years. They wrote the English lyrics to Legrand’s ‘The Windmills of Your Mind,’ which I love and do often in concert. And, over the years, I’ve thrived in collaborations with Marvin Hamlisch and with Peter Matz, both of whom have passed away. I worked with concert director and producer Richard-Jay Alexander before, and I’m currently working with David Shire, who has a room in his house dedicated to Streisand,” says the singer.

As she developed “The Streisand Effect” – a moniker that comes from Streisand being the first celebrity who tried to remove an online photograph of her house in Malibu, and by trying to get it removed, making it instead go viral. Now taught in technology law classes, according to Errico, the Streisand Effect is essentially that the harder you try to hide something, the bigger and more public it becomes – Errico and collaborator Billy Stritch both understood the value of being surrounded by Streisand insiders as the concert took shape.

“I’m not sure what else I could have done, except maybe growing flowers like the ones she has in her garden," she says with a laugh. "If I look back to when I first knew who she was, I wouldn’t have even thought of trying to be like her. It’s like seeing a beautiful mountain and thinking, ‘I want to be that.’ You can’t. Instead, you look at it and just go, ‘Wow!’' Putting together all of what I could learn about her history became a Venn diagram of her influence on my life. Everything I've ever collected, she has preceded me exquisitely. And with all these beautiful things, she created a kind of beauty that I was triggered to bring together when I read her book ‘My Name Is Barbra.’

“I’ve also listened to the audiobook and while I was reading and then listening to her tell her life story, this sort of layered thing took place that presented me with the opportunity to create a concert about courage, about artistic courage, personal courage. She didn't fit into the conventional mold or into anyone else’s idea of who she should be. As she said in the book, she always had a voice in her head that was often right. As I was reading the book, I became more aware there's something really, really profound for me in it, that I might be late to but still need, which is individuality and a sense of confidence,” says the self-described “very big fan” of Streisand. “I was on page 729 and I read Pat Conroy’s letter where he calls her ‘a daughter of fire.’ She italicizes it on the next page, and says, ‘Oh, Daughter of Fire, I like that.’ And then she explained that her grandmother, who spoke Yiddish to her when she was a child, used to call her Farbrent, which means ‘on fire.’”

In Provincetown, Errico - married to childhood sweetheart Patrick McEnroe, former professional tennis player and current ESPN broadwcaster, with whom she has three daughters - will probably light more than a few flames with her selection of Streisand songs.

“I open with ‘I’m All Smiles,’ a Michael Leonard and Herbert Martin song from the 1965 Broadway musical ‘The Yearling,’ which Barbra later recorded, and then go straight into ‘On a Clear Day.’ Barbra, of course, did the Burton Lane song in the 1970 film ‘On a Clear You Can See Forever,’ and later I did the song in an off-Broadway production of the show. I also do Harold Arlen’s ‘A Sleepin’ Bee,’ from the musical ‘House of Flowers,’ which Barbra often calls her favorite song. The first time I did it was at a Harold Arlen event and it immediately went through my head that this was the kind of music I wanted to sing for the rest of my life. And I’ll also be singing ‘Lazy Afternoon’ by John La Touche and Jerome Moross, from Barbra’s album of the same name. For me, ‘Lazy Afternoon’ is more than just a song, it’s the sexiest thing on God’s earth. My version was arranged by the late George Duvivier, George Benson’s arranger. It’s super funky and I make it unique to me but inspired by Barbra’s self-confidence.”

Without giving away the complete set list, Errico acknowledged that she will be doing “The Way We Were” and bringing a little disco to P-town with “No More Tears (Enough Is Enough).” She’ll close the show with the Streisand standard “People,” written by Jule Styne and Bob Merrill for “Funny Girl,” but not before she does a new song, written especially for “The Streisand Effect.”

“I called David Shire, who’s the only one of Barbra’s influences and key collaborators who’s still alive, and with whom I'm working now on something else, and asked him if he would write a song for me that would define the concert. He did and now I have a song by David Shire called ‘Daughter of Fire,’ which I can’t wait to sing for everyone at Town Hall.”

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