The world of cabaret does not lack for superb singers, and talented songwriters are at least as plentiful.
But the cabaret singer who writes her own tunes is an endangered species, which may be why singer-songwriter Amanda McBroom has smitten critics coast to coast, and beyond.
“Casual and conversational, she puts her own spin on even the most standard of standards,” Wayman Wong wrote in the New York Daily News a couple of years ago. “Still, it’s McBroom’s songs — both theatrical and passionate pop/folk — that steal the show.”
Or, as British critic Sheridan Morley put it last year, “She is a lyricist first, a singer second and perhaps a composer third.” (McBroom’s signature tune is “The Rose,” from the 1979 Bette Midler film of the same name.)
“You go home feeling that you have made a joyous discovery of a truly intelligent, literate writer-performer,” Morley added. “Her lyrics sometimes run to four or five syllables (when did you last hear one of those?) and at her considerable best she is a brilliant historian of the old Hollywood hills.”
That last, in fact, may be the element distinguishing McBroom’s songs from anyone else’s. When her songs address vintage show business, even peripherally, they show a deep affection for an entertainment world often regarded these days with richly deserved cynicism.
Consider one of her most moving pieces, “Errol Flynn,” as haunting an evocation of Hollywood’s Golden Age as one will encounter from a writer working in the ’90s. More than that, though, “Errol Flynn” pays homage not so much to its title character but to the great actor’s frequent second banana, a mostly forgotten actor named David Bruce who also happened to be McBroom’s father.
From the outset, the song’s lyrics disarm the listener:
In a hall on a wall in a house in Reseda,
There’s a poster held up by two nails and a pin.
It’s my daddy, the actor, ’bout to die with his boots on,
He’s the man standing up there beside Errol Flynn.
He got third or fourth billing at the end of each picture.
`That don’t mean much,’ he would say with a grin.
But he held my hand tight as he pointed his name out
Only four or five names down below Errol Flynn.
By the time McBroom finishes performing the song (which she wrote with veteran Hollywood director Gordon Hunt), there aren’t many dry eyes in the house. Anyone who treasures the memory of a father who has passed away instantly takes this song to be his own.
“We used to pop popcorn and watch his movies on the late, late show — things like `Young Daniel Boone’ and `The Sea Hawk’ and `Don Juan,’ ” remembers McBroom, who was born in Burbank. “It was very surreal to see him on the screen, and to be sitting next to him, but I was always very proud of him.”
So perhaps it’s no surprise that McBroom fell in love with show business early on, acting in children’s theater by age 7 and watching the late show every chance she had. But her life took a dramatic turn at age 13, when her mother developed cancer and young Amanda was dispatched to the small, dusty Texas town of Mercedes to live with her aunt.
“I almost never saw my parents anymore,” McBroom says. “My mom died about a year after I moved, and I didn’t see my father again until college.”
That parting must have been enormously painful, though McBroom doesn’t talk about it much these days. Precisely how the turn of events shaped the artist she would become is open to debate, yet there’s no arguing that most of her songs show a wide streak of pain, as in the final, searing strains of “Errol Flynn”:
Now I’m sitting alone in a house in Reseda,
Watching the late show as moonlight shines in.
And up on the screen. . . well, here comes my daddy.
It’s a sad funny feeling; now I’m older than him.
So, you daddys and daughters, you sons and you mothers,
Remember life’s over before it begins.
So love one another and stand close together
As close as my dad did to old Errol Flynn.
It takes a long time to learn to write a song that says so much, so poetically, in so few words. For McBroom, the songwriter’s journey began shortly after she graduated from the University of Texas, in 1969. By the early ’70s, she won a role in a San Francisco production of “Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris,” and her life never would be the same.
“I think two things happened to Amanda when she got in the Brel show,” says George Ball, an actor in the same production who became McBroom’s husband. “The most important thing — and Amanda didn’t even know it happened at the time — was that she began to understand somewhere in the back of her own mind that she could write a song.
“And I think the reason that her lyrics are so meaningful is because that’s the show that she first got into. She didn’t get into some lightweight Broadway material, she got into a show by a man (Brel) who wrote incredible poetry.”
By 1978 McBroom had locked herself into a room to write a song she would title “The Rose,” and when Midler heard a tape that had been passed along to her by friends, she immediately decided to sing it in her 1979 film.
The tune became a quick pop hit, winning McBroom a singing appearance on the Oscars, a Golden Globe Award and a degree of recognition in the same industry that had forgotten her father.
David Bruce died in 1976, too early to see his daughter become a hit in movies — at least musically — but his memory, as well as all the other heartbreaks one acquires in life, helped McBroom write some of the most powerful cabaret songs being performed today. Much of this repertoire is on her sumptuous new CD, “Amanda McBroom: A Waiting Heart” (Gecko Records).
In the mid-’80s, McBroom began taking her show on the road, slowly building a wide fan base.
Whether the world at large will discover McBroom’s songwriting gifts, whether she’ll have another hit on the order of “The Rose,” remains to be seen.
But artistically, she has arrived.
“At first, I found it terrifying to sing my own stuff for people, because you’re safe when you’re hiding behind the words of somebody else,” says McBroom, who opens a two-week engagement Wednesday at Le Cabaret in Cite. “The thing that was astonishing to me was that once I began singing my songs, people kept coming up to me and saying, `That’s how I feel.’
“I remember when we were first doing `Heartbeats,’ ” adds McBroom, referring to a small 1990 musical on which she collaborated with several songwriters. “A lady said to me, `How did you get in my kitchen? How did you know what I talk about and think about?’
“And I said, `No, you were in my kitchen,’ because I just have very ordinary feelings, and maybe that’s why a lot of people understand what I’m singing about.”
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Amanda McBroom appears Wednesday through June 22 in Le Cabaret at Cite, on the 70th floor of Lake Point Tower, 505 N. Lake Shore Drive. 312-644-4050.
