Andrea Piazza: Still Entertaining After All These Years

By John Addyman

 

So many years. So many memories. So many songs.

Big tinted shades. Always a perky hat and bejeweled outfit.

She walks into the room and brings 58 years of show music with her, like a princess carrying a magic cape.

And she’s singing.

“Que Sera Sera” pipes right up. For this group, in a nursing home on the big lake, it’s perfect. The tune, from the 1956 movie “The Man Who Knew Too Much,” brings memories about Doris Day and Jimmy Stewart.

She has a pianist, Ernesto LaBella, still getting things set up for the show, but Andrea Contestable Piazza, 78, is already out of the gate. She’s got the mic and the tune is dropping on 30-some people, some in wheelchairs, some in walkers. And suddenly, they’re singing, too.

Piazza has motherly, sisterly radar and she’s homing in on people who aren’t singing, who haven’t figured out that they’re here to have fun. And now she’s nose-to-nose in someone’s face. She’s singing to them, just them and the whole room is starting to follow. And the woman who had been silent is moving her lips. “Whatever will be, will be” she whispers.

On the chorus, the woman latches on to Piazza’s microphone and her voice bubbles up.

“Que sera sera,” she said.

A smile, a hug and Piazza is off to the next quiet person and the next song.

 

Singing since fourth grade

“I’ve been doing this for 58 years,” she said. “Show biz. Part of my life. This day, my passion is to give back, to do sing-a-longs in senior centers as my small way of giving back and saying ‘Thank You!’”

At Blessed Sacrament elementary school in Rochester, Sister Claudia saw the irrepressible energy little Andi Piazza had and got her singing in fourth grade. Sister Claudia went on to the high school where she cheered for Andi in chorus, theatre and musicals.

“I was an Indian in ‘Peter Pan,’” Piazza said. “I was Rumpelstiltskin with a little beard and a little hat and a long nose.”

After high school, she was a princess in “The King and I” and started a solo career.

“I went to Monroe Community College for two years and I started singing at the Golden Nugget in Rochester,” Piazza said.

“There was a lot of music; it was a huge place and that’s where I got started. I was in a folk group, the Summerville Pier. The guitarist I worked with, Jack Alocco, ended up winning 11 Grammys and is in the Rochester Music Hall of Fame as a composer, conductor and songwriter.”

Folk music went quiet. Some personnel changes and a switch to more danceable music kept the group going for a while. Piazza finally sought work elsewhere.

“I can’t remember how many bands I sang with at Val’s Lounge, Teddy Bear Carousel, Top of the Plaza, The Cave…just numerous bands. I was in a bunch of different groups. When we did Val’s Lounge, it was dance music. I was the lead singer, the female vocalist.”

She also taught second grade in Wayland for two years.

“Not my thing,” she said.

And then there was that three-day trip to Woodstock.

Then a new groove.

“In 1975, a friend of mine in Syracuse, Betty Sebastian, decided to put together this show group, a three-girl front, to basically do music from the ‘30s and ‘40s — The Big Apple Band. We were booked out of New York City. We went on the road in 1975, our first job was in New York, then we were all over the world, all over the country.”

A new agent shortened the trio’s name to “Apple Band” and the group made its mark mimicking other female trios — the Andrews Sisters, the Pointer Sisters.

“We did shows. We were a pretty phenomenal group. We had a country segment. I was Dolly Parton. Yeah. It was just a very polished group, real sharp. We’re on YouTube now.”

You can hear the pride in her voice.

“I was single then, and I ended up marrying the leader of the group, Sal Piazza. He was our bass player. I had two children while I was performing,” she said.

Piazza’s family was now in Atlantic City, and the entertainment business seemed to come to them.

“We were one of the first groups to perform at Resorts International — the only casino in Atlantic City at that time,” she explained.

And things were big time. “We worked with Sam Butera [bandleader backing Louis Prima], Freddie Bell and the Bellboys [recorded on the Mercury label], the Swingin Trainers, [Okeh label], we worked with guys from Las Vegas for many years,” she said. “When the band broke up in 1995, we moved back to Rochester.

“I started doing these shows with a married couple from the Apple Band [Sam and Nancy DeLeo] at Crescent Beach Restaurant. We did two shows a day, bus charters, at 2 and 4 p.m. That was our Viva Vaca cabaret show.”

 

Singing for seniors

In 2002 she started a new business — Stargrams — where she hired and developed impersonators.

“My idea was to do singing telegrams. I had a Marilyn Monroe, an Elvis, a Frank Sinatra, a Liza Minelli. But then I started booking parties in Rochester. From that I started doing dinner shows at Golden Ponds Restaurant with impersonators — ‘Ladies of Illusion’ — Cher, Diana Ross. We had an hour-long show,” she said.

The call of an incoming grandson moved Piazza to family in Florida in 2009. She immediately started up a murder mystery dinner show at Café Unique in Cocoa Beach. But like ghosts, those impersonators materialized again.

“At the Melbourne Beach Crab Shack, I brought in Friday night shows with Marilyn Monroe, Elton John, Artha Franklin — impersonators who did a one-hour dinner show,” she said. “We did that for five years until COVID-19 and the owner died of covid. That was the end of that.

“I moved back to Rochester 2015 and started singing with two former cops, Lou Tutono and Vinnie Faggiano. We were known as ‘Sugar and Spice.’”

Now in her 60s, Piazza was diagnosed with ovarian cancer and other than an occasional singing date with Rutono, she stopped performing.

In the last three years, she’s found what may be her final yet most personal audience.

“Senior centers,” she explained. “I’ve been doing that with Ernesto Labello, keyboard, who is a fabulous singer, a lot of fun. We average six dates a month and I absolutely love it. We have good people at the places we go, every month they want us. We’re there for one hour and it’s interactive. I have a cordless mic and I start out with ‘Que Sera Sera,’ then I get them all to sing. We do fun stuff, really fun music and they love it.

“I love everything I’ve done, but this is more meaningful. There are some places we’ll play and the people are in wheelchairs. I go over with my mic and I’m singing and they’re looking at me. They’re trying to sing. They want to sing. Some are pretty sharp. Some of the places, it’s just emotional. But they’re old.

“At this time in my life, being able to walk into a room and bring joy through music and laughter is just…it’s just making a difference in my life. It’s what I need to do. The singing along is most important to me, rather than when I was singing in shows or I was on stage and singing “New York, New York” and bringing the house down. That was most important to me. It’s not important anymore, it’s just not.”

 

Resident lineup

Her career with the Apple Band and Viva Voca took Andrea Piazza to the Bahamas, Aruba, Canada, Saudi Arabia and all over the states with repeated gigs in Las Vegas, Atlantic City and Miami Beach.

But now the place she loves to be — and the places that love her to be there — have a much different audience. To watch her work the room in an adult home is to appreciate how much she makes entertainment that physically, mentally and emotionally transforms a tough audience from inert to fascinated to entertained.

“I come in the main door and residents are lined up against the wall all around the room. And they’re in their beds and wheelchairs. I’ve established such a relationship with some of these people that now I wear a hat and they wait for me to give it to someone,” she said. “There are just so many in that audience who are meaningful to me. I want to continue to do this for a long time.”

When her show starts, Piazza is all over the room, reintroducing herself to everyone. One woman rises to dance with her. Another is silent and looks confused. Piazza approaches slowly.

“When I have the mic, they try to sing. If they’re not able to speak, they want to sing. All the music we do is just fun. The songs we choose for that hour are tunes they know. They remember: “Chattanooga Choo-Choo,” “Let Me Call You Sweetheart,” ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow,’” she said.

And the woman who looked skittish has tugged on the microphone and begins to sing.

“I can’t even begin to tell you how much that means to me,” Piazza said. “I would do two of these shows a day if I could. It’s not the money, it’s just … if on my birthday, someone asks me how I’m going to spend it, I’d say, I’ve got two shows to do.”

“Two shows?” someone would ask.

“Yes! That’s what I want to do,” she said.