Amanda McBroom: My Favourite Things – Pizza Express Holborn

Amanda McBroom: My Favourite Things at Pizza Express Holborn, London.

Star rating: five stars ★★★★★

It is always good news when singer-songwriter-actress Amanda McBroom is back in London. She had been appearing with fellow songstress Ann Hampton Callaway at The Pheasantry in Chelsea and ended her London season with a solo show at Pizza Express Holborn, a fairly new cabaret venue which actually manages to re-create the look and the ambience of the late-lamented Pizza on the Park. It’s good to report that McBroom fits it perfectly and it is to be hoped that she will return again and again.

Of course her show is not exactly a solo performance because she has her songwriting collaborator Michele Brourman in tow as musical director at the piano. Together they have written some great songs but they also essay the work of other songwriters. For example the Peggy Lee/ William Schluger number ‘I Love Being Here With You’ which here has acquired some topical references that are completely unexpected.

McBroom and Brourman specialise in writing and/or performing either hilariously funny songs or deeply emotional ones, such as ‘Make Me a Kite’, ‘Ship in a Bottle’, ‘Crimes of the Heart’ and ‘Baby in a Box’. One minute they will tear your heart out, while in the next you’ll be falling off your seat with laughter.

Whereas many songs generalise about human emotion and feelings, every song from McBroom is real and deals quite specifically with a certain somebody. In ‘Crimes of the Heart’ it’s about a 40-something woman lusting after a boy under 30. But, it says, where there’s passion and pain, that way madness lies. ‘Baby in a Box’ has a personal connection for McBroom as she saw an abandoned baby lying in a shoebox. She can take an incident like this and turn it into a minor tragedy.

When she’s funny McBroom is really funny. ‘I Want to Be Round’, not thin like a celery stick, she announces, and then proceeds to enlighten us on ways to keep rather than shed weight. She herself admits that being in London has allowed her to discover the Scotch egg and clotted cream – perfect ingredients for a ‘round’ girl.

She also has an ongoing plan to write herself a one-woman musical based on Shakespeare’s women, just because, as she says, nobody else is going to… Hence LadyMacbeth Sings the Blues. So far we have had a rather kindly Gertrude, that’s Hamlet’s mother; she also takes the rise (or the depth) out of the waterlogged Ophelia and questions the motives of Titania, the Queen of the Fairies, who gets more than her fair share of “ass” in the shape of Bottom, the donkey boy.

Both McBroom and Brourman have great voices that are versatile in the extreme. For a breather they give us an excellent version of Cole Porter’s ‘I’ve Got You Under My Skin’, nicely reinterpreted in Brourman’s fine arrangement. And of course there’s always Jacques Brel, because McBroom’s first big break came in the stage show about the Belgian singer-songwriter. She gives more than spirited performances of two classic Brel numbers, ‘Marieke’, sung in Flemish, and ‘Carousel’ which gathers speed and vocal dexterity as it careers towards a brilliant finale.

As McBroom was appearing at Pizza Express Holborn on Father’s Day, it was appropriate that she sing ‘Errol Flynn’, a tribute to her own father, the actor David Bruce, who was in over 70 Hollywood films and TV series including The Sea Hawkwith Errol Flynn. It never fails to leave its emotional mark.

She also couldn’t leave out ‘The Rose’, the song that brought her to fame, even though it almost never made it to the Bette Midler film of the same name which was based on the life of Janis Joplin. The film’s producers didn’t like the song, but the Divine Miss M did, and the rest is cinema and music history, a hit for everybody concerned.

Brourman gets her own spot in the limelight in a solo song called ‘You’re Only Old Once’ which turns life upside down as indeed do the majority of the McBroom/Brourman output of songs. They are a great team and a complete package of singer-writer-composer-musician. Let’s hope they come back to London soon. We need cabaret of quality like this.

Michael Darvell