Melissa Errico and Adam Gopnik

Love, Desire & Mystery — Il Parle, Elle Chante

World Premiere

Part I: Love — Presented on Wednesday, October 14, 2020 at 7pm ET

Part II: Desire — LIVE on Thursday, January 28, 2021 at 7pm ET

Part III: Mystery — LIVE on Thursday, May 6, 2021 at 7pm ET

Tedd Firth on piano

70 minutes each

Streamed LIVE from FIAF Florence Gould Hall

Acclaimed Broadway actress and chanteuse Melissa Errico, working in collaboration with New Yorker essayist and lyricist Adam Gopnik, presents a series of three concerts weaving together music and conversation.

The trio of concerts delves into every aspect of the great French obsession: l’amour fou, or crazy, overpowering, all-consuming love. Through these evenings Errico and Gopnik investigate and illuminate the cycle that France first offered the world—of how love becomes desire, how desire is cloaked in mystery, and how then the mystery of desire reveals the madness of love again.

Part II: Desire — LIVE on Jan 28, 2021

This evening of music and conversation, the second in the series, considers the French art of seduction and its American responses. In particular, it dives into the ways sex has become entangled in other matters of pleasure and life. Appetites for love and food, a classic French pairing, take up much of the evening, with songs from Adam Gopnik’s musical Our Table and the Broadway adaptation of The Baker’s Wife. The second half focuses on the equally potent French duo of seduction and fashion, with selections from, among other shows and movies, Funny Face and Coco. Building on the first episode, debuts of brand new material will be set alongside excursions into French art music and the best of Broadway.

Part III: Mystery — LIVE on May 6, 2021

Details coming soon.

Part I Love — Performed on Oct 14, 2020 (video available)

The first concert of the series centered on love, a special preoccupation in France. It began with the invention of the love song in the feminist medieval court of Eleanor of Aquitaine, and wound its way through the long history of the French cult of love. Melissa Errico presented her favorite French love songs—including Michel Legrand’s “Valse des Lilas,” among others—as well as examples of the American love of France, including Cole Porter’s “I Love Paris,” Sondheim’s portrait of Seurat, and additional delectable surprises. Errico also performed the world premiere of a love song written by Adam Gopnik and David Shire from a musical they are developing about Eleanor of Aquitaine.

Learn more at fiaf.org