‘Melissa Errico: ’Twas The Night After Christmas – A Winter Party with Billy Stritch’
54 Below
Through December 30

“Aren’t you kind of glad it’s over?” Melissa Errico asks, a few songs into her latest offering at 54 Below. “I haven’t even had a chance to get drunk yet.”

With this program, Ms. Errico establishes a whole new kind of a seasonal mood, demonstrating that the days immediately after the big holiday — just before we start wishing everyone a “Happy New Year” — are worth commemorating as well.

Wisely, she eschews the more religious traditional carols and songs, as well as those detailing the antics of Santa and his cast of Christmas characters. Instead, she focuses on songs of the season that capture the mood of the moment on both sides of December 25 — like Sammy Cahn and Jule Styne’s “Christmas Waltz” as well as songs about family, such as “I’ll Be Home for Christmas.”

Ms. Errico also uses fashion statements to illustrate the different aspects of the holiday and post-holiday moods: She starts by taking the stage in green flannel pajamas and giving forth with Barbra Streisand’s 1967 double-time arrangement of “Jingle Bells.” She makes a point of highlighting repurposed songs that were never originally intended as holiday numbers, like two about sleighing and partying that were gradually absorbed into the Christmas canon, “Jingle Bells” and “Sleigh Ride,” the latter delivered as a duet with musical director Billy Stritch. 

Likewise, she follows in the footsteps of Tony Bennett in interpreting “My Favorite Things” as a seasonal song, and she follows Ms. Streisand again in “I Remember” — few of us had ever noticed that this Sondheim song’s references to the world outdoors are all chilly scenes of winter.  

Here, she starts with the holiday-centric verse that Sondheim wrote at Ms. Streisand’s request for her 2001 Christmas album. More Sondheim follows courtesy of her longtime collaborator, Adam Gopnik, a writer for the New Yorker who supplies a set of parodies of Sondheim standards as retooled for Christmas. The funniest of which is titled “Not Seeing Santa Today,” taking a tune from “Company” as its point of departure. 

Halfway through the set, Ms. Errico departs the stage with Mr. Stritch in charge; along with bassist David Finck and drummer Eric Halvorson, he gives us three excellent seasonal songs — including “Winter Weather,” which we remember from both Benny Goodman and Fats Waller — that haven’t yet been overdone enough to have become cliches. Mr. Stritch’s finest moment here, though, is with Ms. Errico on “That Holiday Feeling,” a blithely cheerful 1964 duet not touched by anyone since Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gormé.

Soon, Ms. Errico returns in the literal mother of all Christmas costumes, a full-on female Santa suit designed by a famous Broadway designer with, coincidentally, a seasonally appropriate name, Eric Winterling. The gown is like what Rosemary Clooney and Vera Ellen wear at the end of “White Christmas,” only on steroids. She offers more repurposed Streisandia — while joking that she’s 38 hours into the audiobook of the legendary diva’s memoir and only up to 1968 — in Paul Williams’s “Evergreen.” 

The show perfectly captures that cocktail of conflicting emotions we all feel in the final days of the year — and this year seemingly more than ever. After “Small World,” her toast to the revival of “Gypsy,” and what is still the world’s no. 1 New Year’s song, Frank Loesser’s “What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve?,” she ends on an optimistic note with “The Best is Yet to Come,” brilliantly nailing the mixed mood of trepidation and hopefulness that most of us are experiencing as we transition into whatever 2025 is likely to bring.