Words and Music: Celebrating 50 Years of Friendship & Song – Amanda McBroom and Michele Brourman – Birdland, New York

Words and Music: Celebrating 50 Years of Friendship & Song – Amanda McBroom and Michele Brourman was performed at Birdland, New York. 

Greetings from New York  where it’s winter, no, wait, it’s spring, well, it’s cold again, now it’s high summer, hang on, it’s down to freezing this morning. Could it be autumn in New York? No, it’s April, I guess.

Recently, though, the atmosphere at Birdland was red hot. You couldn’t have got a cigarette paper between the crowds of people competing to shoehorn themselves in to see Amanda McBroom and Michele Brourman in cabaret. It was a tight fit. The audience, when finally seated after the good-natured pushing and shoving for breathing space at Birdland’s tables and bar, was excited and excitable.

They were all fans of these two women who have been best friends and songwriting partners for 50 years. There was nobody in that packed room who was not aware that this duo had created numerous songs that have become standards in the cabaret world.

Together they’re funny, with a light touch, naturally bouncing off each other’s jokes with a charming warmth and respect. And when they sing together, the harmony of the two voices is both practiced and spontaneous.

They treated us to a set that was packed with songs from different eras of their life together, from the very earliest song they wrote to songs whose ink is barely dry. Once of the newest, ‘Do You Sleep?’, is clearly aimed at the President of the United States and packs an angry punch; others are gentle, serious, nostalgic, warm, surreal, lyrical and laugh-out-loud funny.

Many of their songs are about, and for, grown-up women, their daily lives, their trials, and their loves. One, which I hadn’t heard before, is about the wife of a serial killer. Some are about the world, others about the kitchen sink. Everything, it seems, in the hands of these two magicians, can become a great song.

Of course they sang their two most famous songs – Brourman’s haunting ‘My Favourite Year’, McBroom’s hope-filled ‘The Rose’, a huge hit for Bette Midler, covered, like ‘My Favourite Year’, by dozens of other singers – but for many, the fun was discovering songs we didn’t know they’d written. Knowledgable, each person present was begging for their own favourite McBroom/Brourman song out of the dozens that they had, perforce, omitted.

The audience was appreciative throughout the set but remained on their feet and cheering, clamouring for more, long after the final encore.

Supremely talented, yet down to earth, an evening spent in the company of McBroom and Brourman is time that returns myriad pleasures. On this occasion, along with the rest of that loving audience, I wouldn’t have wanted to be anywhere else in the world.

Ruth Leon