Amanda McBroom: Let’s Fall in Love

Renowned American cabaret star Amanda McBroom returns to Sydney’s City Recital Hall for the first time in a decade on 19 July 2014, as well as appearing at the Melbourne Recital Centre on 18 July.

Pondering the light and dark sides of romance, McBroom will perform alongside her longstanding pianist Michele Brourman in their intimate show Let’s Fall In Love.

The pair will perform interpretations of classic American songs from Cole Porter, Jerome Kern, Dorothy Fields and Sammy Cahn as as well as songs by McBroom and Brourman themselves, including their 1980s classic hit The Rose.

Let’s Fall In Love promises an evening of love, lust and cherished dreams with one of the greatest cabaret stars of her generation.

Ahead of her concerts, Amanda McBroom answered some questions from Stage Whispers.

How did you start writing songs?

By accident. I have always been a singer. Folk singing in school, musical theater, etc. It happened one day when I was in my late twenties, I guess. I was on the road with a production of Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris and it was my night off and i picked up my guitar and started to noodle and something appeared. I played it for my husband George and he said, "Oh, my god. You just wrote a song! …and it's good!" That started it.

As well as your own songs, your current concert performances feature songs from the “Great American Songbook”. Are there particular songwriters who have influenced your writing, as against being choices for performance?

Absolutely! Jacques Brel is a huge influence. Judy Collins. Oscar Hammerstein. 

How did you select the mix of songs you sing in your current concert Let’s Fall in Love?

I collaborated with my Musical Director, Michele Brourman, with whom I have worked for many years. I told her I wanted to sing an evening of love songs for grown ups, since I am one, and we started playing with some of our favorite tunes, re-arranging, re-thinking, and this is the evening we came up with.

You’ve performed across musical theatre, cabaret, concert, and in the recording studio. What are some of the complementary and contrasting aspects of those areas of performance for you?

Whew! Do you have an hour or six?  Musical theater is the basis of all my writing and performing. It was my initial art form. Cabaret is different from musical theater in that you don't have a character to hide behind. In cabaret, the only actor is you, your personality, and then how you choose to infuse it into the characters of each of the songs you choose. You can never hide behind a wig in cabaret. Cabaret is intimate. Concert is cabaret on steroids.  I like to turn a 500 person audience into friends in my living room. That is, I think, the essence of cabaret. The recording studio is a small, extremely honest space. You have to pull everything inside…think small…think truth…

But all performances, small to large, reflect the drama that is each song. Each song is a monologue. It is all theater.

Michele Brourman is your pianist, your musical director and your song-writing collaborator. Tell us a little about the chemistry of your collaboration.

Michele is one of the most talented people I have ever known. A brilliant pianist, arranger, song-writer, producer. She can even cook! We met in 1974, liked each other immediately, wrote one song together as an experiment, and discovered that we think the same way, only her compositional knowledge is much vaster than mine. So I am the wordsmith  and she  takes my words, suggests what needs fixing, and then sets them to her astonishing music.

The Rose is your best-known song, but do you have another favourite song of your own, perhaps from the current concert, with a special story behind it?

That would probably be "Errol Flynn", the love song I wrote for my father, David Bruce, who was a film actor in the 40's. I had been trying to write a song for him for ever, and one night my friend Gordon Hunt, a director in Los Angeles (father of the actress Helen Hunt), handed me a poem he had just written about my dad. I looked at it and realized here was the song. So I sat down and re-wrote it to  give it song structure and set a melody to it, and it has been one of the outstanding songs in my repertoire since then.

Some of your best-known songs are very beautiful in their simplicity - is this an approach you actively take or more a result of your creative process?

I try to write simply as often as possible. I have a tendency to lean towards purple prose in letters and such, but I want things to be singable for everyone, and memorable. And simplicity is the heart of a good song.

How would you compare writing stand-alone songs and your scores for musicals like Heartbeats and A Woman of Will?

It’s the same process. Easier, actually, to have a project with a plot that you can write to…then you know somewhat where you are going - always nice to have a plot!

Anyone who releases a cover of "suicide is painless" (commonly known as the M*A*S*H theme song) is required to send a copy of their version to the song's composer who archives every recording. Do you have a similar quirk about "The Rose" and is there a particular version that you'd consider to be your favourite interpretation?

No quirks. I am always delighted if someone chooses to sing it and hope they will send it to me for my archives. But I am not a stickler about it.

As a versatile singer/songwriter, actress and cabaret performer, if you had to choose and do just one, what would it be?

They are all rolled into one. However, if someone wants to offer me a Broadway Musical, I won't say no.

Let’s Fall In Love: Amanda McBroom with Michele Brourman

City Recital Hall - Angel Place,
Sydney

7.30pm on Saturday 19^th July

Tickets: $40-$65

Bookings: (02) 8256 2222, cityrecitalhall.com, or in person at City Recital Hall Angel

Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Melbourne Recital Centre.

7.30pm on Friday 18^th July 

Bookings: melbournerecital.com.au or phone 9699 3333

Questions provided by Ian Nisbet, Coral Drouyn and Neil Litchfield.