Never compete with the master! Cynthia Erivo steamrolled Jimmy Fallon on the Tonight Show with her powerhouse voice on a special Broadway edition of Musical Genre Challenge. In her November 14, 2024, appearance on the show, she began the challenge with a comical note, singing “All That Jazz” with a country twang, which Fallon matched with an energetic ‘90s boy band take on “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina.” The real show-stopper came when Erivo then sang “The Sound of Music” in an R&B and pop style.
Readers who have heard Erivo do her thing will know that this particular challenge was just made for her skills. I never would have guessed that the 1959 musical would have worked so well as an R&B tune, but that’s just the magic that Erivo brings to the table! She really made it sound like it was meant to be that way all along. As the audience applauded, Fallon recognized how much she’d nailed it, and declared, “Print that, I would listen to that. I love that, c’mon!”
Erivo’s Musical Genre Challenge on The Tonight Show proved to be a hit on YouTube, where it racked up 1.5 million views in the six weeks since it was uploaded. Fans showed their appreciation below the video with comments such as “Something that makes Cynthia so different from other singers is that she’s extremely versatile. She can sing any and every genre of music effortlessly. She is unlike any singer of our time,” and “I want ‘The Sound of Music’ as R&B Pop in my Spotify ASAP.”
Erivo has had a big 2024, with a number of high-profile appearances. The English musical star scored another viral video with her duet on “Killing Me Softly” with American Broadway singer Joaquina Kalukango. The pair dropped the soulful rendition of the old-school classic at the Kennedy Center, scoring a 3.7 million view video in the process.
Cynthia Erivo is a 37-year-old singer and actress who was born on January 8, 1987, to Nigerian parents in London, England. Readers might be interested to learn that she made her West End debut in the 2011 production of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. She later debuted on Broadway with the 2015-2017 production of The Color Purple. Erivo began working in film in 2018, and the following year she was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress for her leading role in the Harriet Tubman biopic Harriet. Since then, Erivo has continued to gain high-profile film and television roles, such as her portrayal of Aretha Franklin in the National Geographic series Genius: Aretha, for which she picked up a Lead Actress Emmy Award nomination.
