Ann Hampton Callaway and Amanda McBroom – The Pheasantry

Ann Hampton Callaway and Amanda McBroom at The Pheasantry, London.

Star rating: five stars ★★★★★

There’s good, then very good, then great, then perfect. This was perfection.

Ann Hampton Callaway and Amanda McBroom, with their friend and collaborator Michele Brourman much more than a mere accompanist on the piano, are singer-songwriters from the very top drawer and to have them in London from their New York and Los Angeles bases was nothing short of a privilege.

The last time they sang together at The Pheasantry was the night after Trump became President and they were in shock. Less fraught this time, they complemented each other absolutely in two-hours-plus of magic that we never wanted to end.

Every emotion is involved, jazzy Callaway with a voice of such power and range that it feels as if it is coming from another planet and a wicked sense of humour, McBroom with songs like ‘Errol Flynn’, a tribute to her B-list actor father David Bruce, and ‘The Rose’ made famous by Bette Midler, that are so beautiful it is hard not to weep.

McBroom writes great comic songs as well but ones with a serious point to make and ‘Putting Things Away’ was a clever example.

Callaway was up to her party tricks again, her impressions of a trumpet and saxophone, Billie Holiday and Sarah Vaughan extraordinary and making up a song on the spur of the moment based on unconnected word-thoughts elicited from the audience as uncanny as ever.

Her ‘I Gaze In Your Eyes’, a little-known Cole Porter verse for which she got permission to write the music, was an early composition that always calls for a hankie while ‘The I’m-too-white-to-sing-the-blues Blues’ was full of humour and ‘No One is Alone’ (from Into The Woods) a rare detour into Sondheim and a version the great man would surely have approved of.

McBroom followed that with a satirical poke ‘Everyone Wants To Be Sondheim (but Me)’, not her song but written by Alan Chapman. She didn’t mean it though and sequed into a serene version of ‘Send in the Clowns’ that fitted her classical voice perfectly. Both she and AHC have a wonderful stillness about them when they perform.

McBroom has an abiding love of Brel – she met her actor-husband George Ball while appearing in Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris – and ‘Carousel’, building up slowly into a tongue-twistingly whirlwind climax was a show-stopper.

‘Love and Let Love’, about tolerance of people of all sexual persuasions, is a newer collaboration that could well become a cabaret standard and ‘My Favourite Year’, her best-known song, gave Brourman the floor to herself and the opportunity to plug her own solo show at The Pheasantry and new CD The Price of Love.

Her artistry on the Pheasantry’s Steinway was a huge component of an evening of total bliss, starting with ‘Let’s Face the Music and Dance’ and fittingly ending with AHC and McBroom harmonising perfectly again on ‘The Rose’, a song we knew would eventually come because the composer would have been lynched if she’d left it out.

Jeremy Chapman