Golden Globe winning songwriter (The Rose), singer and actress Amanda McBroom marks the 91st birthday of composer Stephen Sondheim by releasing a single of ‘Send in the Clowns’.
Star rating: five stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
It is 23 years since Amanda McBroom played Desiree Armfeldt in A Little Night Music at the Gold Coast Theatre just outside Los Angeles and stopped the show with ‘Send in the Clowns’.
Now, she has chosen his best-known song to celebrate Stephen Sondheim’s 91st birthday and it is a total delight, bringing out the actress in her as well as the perfect timing ‘Clowns’ demands. What took you so long, Amanda?
The Los Angeles singer-songwriter, a regular visitor to London with her great friend and accompanist Michele Brourman, in particular to The Pheasantry, is better known for performing her own songs – notably ‘The Rose’ which Bette Midler made into a worldwide No.1 at the end of the 1970s but also gems such as ‘Errol Flynn’, ‘Ship in a Bottle’, ‘Dreaming’ and ‘Make Me a Kite’.
Before she turned to songwriting this flawless contralto was an actress and folk singer. She met her husband George when touring with Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris and both later starred in Sondheim favourites Sweeney Todd, she as Mrs Lovett, in Los Angeles and A Little Night Music. Her love of Sondheim greatly predated those two masterpieces. “I fell in love with him the moment I saw West Side Story.”
It is this understanding of ‘Send in the Clowns’, one of the truly great songs in musical theatre and the only number Sondheim wrote for a particular actress, in this case Glynis Johns, the first Desiree on Broadway in 1973, that McBroom brings to the table.
For Desiree, ALNM, based on the Ingmar Bergman film Smiles of a Summer Night, needed a glamorous actress with a sense of comedy whose best days were perhaps behind her and Johns, with her trademark sexy, husky voice, fitted the part admirably.
The problem was that Johns had only a small-range singing voice and sustaining notes was not her forte, so Sondheim put ‘Clowns’ together with short phrases, frequent question marks and pauses, all tailored to the comfort zone of the British actress.
It is those pauses which McBroom masters so beautifully in this eloquent monologue of regret and anger with herself at making the wrong choices in life.
It is not a song that requires a great singing voice, as Johns, Dorothy Tutin and Judi Dench, all actors first, singers second, proved.
To convey its complex meaning to an audience many of whom won’t have a clue what it is about, particularly when hearing it outside the confines of the show, an actress who herself understands it totally is needed.
Here we have in McBroom a performer of intelligence equally dazzling on both fronts. As she says: “Someone said to me the other day she had never really understood the lyrics until she heard my version.
“I feel we’ve had a year of falling off the high wire and why this song is so relevant today is that when some disaster at the circus like someone falling off the high wire happened, the call went out ‘Quick, send in the clowns’ to divert the audience and keep them smiling.”
It was ‘Send in the Clowns’ that got me seriously into Sondheim when the American folk singer Judy Collins sang it at a London concert in the 1970s and put it on her Judith album.
I didn’t understand it then either nor when I bought the cast album with the striking Miss Johns who incidentally is still alive at 97. I still loved it to pieces but It was only when I saw the show on stage for the first time in the 1989 London revival with Tutin and Lila Kedrova that it really clicked.
The song has been recorded by hundreds of singers, from Frank Sinatra and Collins in the mid-70s to the latest McBroom version which is greatly enhanced by Brourman’s piano artistry and co-arranger Stephan Oberhoff on guitar.
It doesn’t get much better than this. It is as haunting and unforgettable as ever. There are other contenders for ‘best cabaret performer in the world’ but to paraphrase football manager Brian Clough’s immortal words: “I wouldn’t say she’s the best in the business, but she is in the top one!” Truly, “losing my timing this late in my career” does not apply to the ageless Amanda.
Jeremy Chapman
- ‘Send in the Clowns’ is released by LML Music and is available from Amazon and through the Amanda McBroom website (www.amcbroom.com)
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