Live from Lincoln Center: Cynthia Errivo

Live from Lincoln Center is doing another series of concerts from Broadway actors this year.  They actually started up a couple weeks ago, but I’ve been playing catch-up on TV after some hectic days, so I’m getting around to them now. The first was with Cynthia Errivo, the only non-Hamilton actor to win a Tony for musical acting in 2016 after blowing my damn mind with her performance as Celie in the revival of The Color Purple (I’ve listened to “I’m Here” I don’t know how many times since then, but I still think of when I first heard her do it at the Tonys.)

I’ll be honest and admit that I only knew a handful of the songs she sang, mostly in the second half of the concert. I liked pretty much all the ones I didn’t know, but it does make it a little tougher for me to get as drawn in as I would with numbers I already love.  That said, there were some really beautiful ones in there.  There was a quiet, gorgeous song called “Jealous” (by Labyrinth,) and I really liked a Robyn song called “Hang with Me”.

For songs I did know, they were quite familiar, albeit not necessarily the way I’m used to hearing them.  Errivo did stripped-down versions of the Beach Boys’ “God Only Knows” and Whitney Houston’s “Dance with Somebody,” in both cases beginning the songs a cappella and adding in the instrumentals and back-up vocals as she went.  She also did a lovely rendition of John Lennon’s “Imagine” and gave an excellent performance of “This Woman’s Work” by Kate Bush.

Errivo is an interesting singer to me, especially for a theatre actress.  She reminds me a little of Lea Salonga in that, while both can definitely bring the power, it’s not something they unleash from the jump.  Like Salonga, Errivo’s command over her voice is phenomenal, and her singing was beautifully controlled throughout the concert.  She can go so soft and gentle but not sound at all thin or weak – in the concert, it still carried every bit as well in these instances as it did in the bigger moments.  This technique, while undeniably impressive, is admittedly less flashy than the belting, but Errivo works it.

She didn’t interact with the crowd too much, the set largely flowing from one song straight into another.  She introduced the concert by telling us that the whole evening was going to be love songs (before “Imagine,” she clarified that that one was about loving our world rather than a love relationship) and invited us to be taken along as she sang us stories. 

Okay, I do have to say that I spent the whole time hoping for “I’m Here” – when Errivo prefaced “Imagine” by saying it was a little different than the other love songs she’d done, my brain immediately went, “‘I’m Here’ is about Celie loving herself!!!” and hoped that’s what she was introducing – and that moment never came.  I get that the songs performed in these concerts are very much “dealer’s choice” and not everyone goes for the songs we know them for (Leslie Odom Jr. didn’t do any Hamilton songs in his last year, and Andrew Rannells tantalizingly talked about Falsettos before doing… a song from A New Brain.)  That doesn’t change how badly I wanted it, though, and I had to listen to it on my Color Purple cast recording afterwards to scratch that itch.