Melissa Errico's video: Melissa Errico - Finishing The Hat by Stephen Sondheim

As Melissa describes it: "I had a chance not long ago to try one of the greatest Sondheim songs – an aria really – “ Finishing The Hat”, from “Sunday In The Park." I had heard my creative partner Raul Esparza sing it countless times on stage, and often thought about what it might mean for a woman to sing it. Knowing though I do that Steve Sondheim himself finds this thought heretical – it’s a song written for Georges Seurat, point, as the French say, period! –I still think that a woman’s point of view on the struggle between creative fulfillment and personal happiness might be provocative, profound, even agonizing. Pure pain. Necessary pain if you are ever to make any art at all. As the great male singers have approached it, the finished hat seems worth the love lost; for a woman, love lost – or family neglected – still come at a higher cost, and though we must finish our artful hats, we register the cost with every dot of color added. Point. There are always families to soothe, men to placate, children to care for-- and even when there are not children to care for, there is sometimes the conscious choice made not to have them. Precious interruptions as you make a hat, before you (for example) even get to the hat band! Starting a hat becomes a most tender experience of appreciation, a profoundly tender one. Finishing a hat is so precious as to be, sometimes, hard to believe." Melissa Errico HTTP://sondheimsublime.com HTTPS://melissaerrico.com