George Ball and Amanda McBroom perform their show Some Enchanted Evening at the Crazy Coqs, London
Some Enchanted Evening: Amanda McBroom & George Ball at the Crazy Coqs, London, continues until 26 April.
Watching Amanda McBroom sitting quietly at the corner of the tiny Crazy Coqs stage and gazing with total adoration at her powerhouse baritone of a husband of 40 years laying into the Brel classic ‘Amsterdam’ – which brought the first half of this blissful evening to a dramatic climax – is as close to cabaret heaven as you can get.
The chemistry between this exceptional singer-songwriter and the man she met when they appeared in the same show, Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris, in San Francisco back in 1969 – “when I was two” as she jokingly puts it – is as palpable now as it was all those years ago.
This is mainly a show about the wear and tear of long-term relationships which she and George Ball are well qualified to sing about, as they do all the time at home, and it is little short of a miracle.
From Sondheim’s cynical ‘The Little Things You Do Together’ to McBroom’s own ‘Dance’ in which a long-married woman yearns for the old days when the “comfortable despair” of middle-age would be replaced by the joyful dancing of the early years and realises it’s just never going to be the same again, we get the message.
It is a song she said she’d written after a “discussion” with Ball when she asked hubby why they never went dancing any more and got told “Dancing is part of the mating ritual, honey; once you’ve mated, you don’t have to go dancing any more.”
On the same topic we hear ‘La Chanson des Vieux Amants’, about the “tender war that goes on forever”, the fights, the rows, the “tricks and deceptions” – “You know my wiles and charms/Sometimes I’ve lost you from my arms” – in one of many nods to the great 1960s songwriter Brel, the Belgian icon who is her songwriting muse.
Counterpointed against the turbulence of Brel is the other, gentler side of long-term love as portrayed in ‘Some Enchanted Evening’ which Ball sings beautifully, and ‘Our Love is Here to Stay’ which the pair saved for an encore after McBroom, with help from her man and her long-time collaborator and accompanist Michele Brourman, had reduced the full house to total silence with her spellbinding ‘The Rose’.
This is the Golden Globe-winning song which has been putting the jam on the family bread ever since she wrote it in the late 1970s and which became a No. 1 hit for Bette Midler in the Janis Joplin biopic of the same name.
It was a song she knocked out in ten minutes, the lyric coming into her head as she listened to a tune on the car radio whose sentiments about the meaning of love she didn’t agree with. Composed in the days when she was much more actress than songwriter, she was stunned when her husband immediately informed her it would end up being a standard. How right he was. It made her name, her fortune, and changed her life.
And what words. Who could get tired of singing or listening to: “Some say love it is a hunger/An endless aching need/I say love it is a flower/And you its only seed” and counsels “It is the heart afraid of breaking/That never learns to dance/It’s the dream afraid of waking/That never takes the chance”. All these years on and still totally wonderful.
Like Anne Reid, who dazzled at the same venue a few weeks ago, McBroom uses all her actress training to deliver a package in which not a word nor anecdote is wasted. Simplicity, truth, stillness, economy – a masterclass in the specialist art of cabaret.
I thought I was going to resent ‘Mr McBroom’ having half of his wife’s singing time – she performed alone on her first visit to the Crazy Coqs last June – but that wasn’t at all the case. This is an even better, warmer show and although Ball will never see three-score-years-and-ten again, his gruff, all-embracing voice is still extraordinary. We must be grateful he has finally brought it across the Atlantic. No wonder that when McBroom first heard it, she lost her heart forever and “wanted to crawl down his vocal cords”.
This is a show worth changing all your weekend plans to see. McBroom and Ann Hampton Callaway in the space of three weeks at the Coqs – it’s good to be alive and well and living in London.
Incidentally, the divine Michele Brourman, a singer-songwriter-pianist out of the very top drawer even if you’ve never heard of her, is staying on to do a solo show at the same Piccadilly venue on Monday, sadly for one night only. Catch her as well if you can.
Jeremy Chapman
www.brasseriezedel.com/crazy-coqs
Readers may also be interested in:
Ann Hampton Callaway – Crazy Coqs – Review
Claire Martin and Joe Stilgoe – April in Paris – Crazy Coqs – Review
SHARE THIS POST:
Comments are closed.