Here’s To Life: Amanda McBroom with Michele Brourman – The Pheasantry

Here’s To Life: Amanda McBroom with Michele Brourman at The Pheasantry, London.

Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩

Any visit by the elegant Los Angeles singer-songwriters Amanda McBroom and Michele Brourman is a cause for celebration and their four-day residency at The Pheasantry was its usual mix of sad songs, topical ones, old ones, new ones and funny ones.

It was 1979 when Bette Midler took McBroom’s ‘The Rose’, a song she had scribbled out in 45 minutes, to the top of the charts and made both their bank managers very happy fellas.

Ever since, she and her principal collaborator Brourman have maintained an exceptionally high level of craftsmanship and musicianship, both as writers and performers.

Naturally, ‘The Rose’ brought their evening to a climax – McBroom risked being lynched if she’d ditched it – and she also included another old favourite, the soulfully reflective country-style ‘Dreaming’.

It’s the fantasy of a woman who has her successful marriage, fine house and the obligatory children but wonders what she’s missing… “dreaming helps take the pain away, dreaming is the only thing that’s mine, dreaming that there’s still love in your eyes”.

It’s a gorgeous composition, like so many of hers, while, as thrilling as ever, Jacques Brel’s ‘Carousel’, getting ever faster but with not one word missed, was like a punch in the stomach, carrying the audience along with it – “the whole world madly turning”.

‘Ariel’s Lament’, from Lady Macbeth Sings The Blues, a show she wrote putting a contemporary spin on Shakespearean characters, featured a jazzy solo that underlined Brourman’s piano mastery. But McBroom’s crystal contralto clarity needed no musical embellishment on the incredibly moving ‘Baby in a Box’ which opened the second half.

The chance to have a pop at Brexit could not be resisted – “for all the nasty problems you have, you ain’t got Trump!” And ‘Strange Days’ posed the question: “How can a pussy-grabbing mogul be President?”

There’s the comedy of ‘How Do You Like Your Eggs?’ and ‘Help! Thanks! Wow!’ contrasted with the simple beauty of ‘London in the Rain’, sung and played by Brourman as a trailer for her solo show in the same cabaret room today (Monday).

Outside their own magical creations, McBroom responded to a request for ‘It’s All in the Game’, the only No. 1 hit composed by an American Vice-President. Calvin Coolidge’s deputy Charles Gates Dawes wrote the music long before he ascended to office in 1925. Carl Sigman added the lyrics in 1951. It was a song McBroom loved dancing to with an early admirer in her college days.

That was a joy, so too her ‘A Cockeyed Optimist’, from South Pacific, which opened the show and ‘Que Sera Sera’ the encore she closed with as a tribute to the late, great Doris Day.

The co-writer of the bittersweet ‘Everything Must Go’, LA lyricist Hillary Rollins, was in the audience to hear the heartbreak of what happens when a relationship ends, just as she was when Dillie Keane featured it at The Pheasantry in April. If it’s good enough for Keane and McBroom, it’s pretty certain to be worth listening to. And it was.

Jeremy Chapman