Amanda McBroom & George Ball: Some Enchanted Evening

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Amanda McBroom and George Ball

Some Enchanted Evening

54 Below, NYC, October 8, 2014

Reviewed by Barbara Leavy for Cabaret Scenes

Amanda-McBroom-George-Ball-Some-Enchanted-Evening-Cabaret-Scenes-Magazine_212In their fabulous show at 54 Below, Some Enchanted Evening, Amanda McBroom and her husband, George Ball, sang of love, marriage, time, loss, and a theme that has always characterized Amanda’s own songwriting—the gap between dreams and reality, between a couple’s hope to be in love forever, and of settling down to an existence of “comfortable despair.”

Because time passing was an intrinsic theme of their well-knit show, neither Amanda or George feigned being young. She was up-front about their meeting in the late ’60s when both were playing in Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris. For this reviewer, it highlighted how many years have passed since I first wrote a feature on Amanda for Cabaret Scenes. At the time it was Amanda as a songwriter and what she was sometimes called, an “urban poet,” that I focused on. I viewed her lyrics as beautifully wrought poems with consistent themes about “Dreaming,” the title of one of her most famous songs. Much later, I would review her CD, Chanson: Amanda McBroom Sings Jacques Brel, one that I still listen to frequently, thrilled to have both Amanda and one of my favorite songwriters on the same recording. Still looking back, but later yet, my husband and I wrote individual reviews of Amanda at the Metropolitan Room, different but equality praiseworthy, and printed side-by-side in Cabaret Scenes magazine. Each of Amanda’s performance I have been to, each recording I listened to—and I have listened to many—brought to mind a very popular characterization among young people today: “awesome.

This night at 54 Below, Amanda was as awesome as ever. Sharing the stage, and her show, with her husband George Ball, himself a subject of a feature article in the upcoming November/December issue of Cabaret Scenes, added further depth to the show. At times poignant and at other times witty, Amanda and George sang together and separately. They parried with each other with “The Little Things You Do Together,” Amanda sang her renowned “Ship in a Bottle,” and George powerfully offered Brel’s “Amsterdam,” the drunken sailor who was anything but the romantic figure Amanda facetiously promised would be the subject of the song.

Two songs were interesting pairings. “Save the Last Dance for Me,” by George, which suggested more about culminating a couple’s lifetime together than about—well, about dancing. Followed then by Amanda and a song of her own, “Dance,” a woman’s lament that she and her husband no longer dance. Yet another interesting pair were an Amanda composition written with Michele Brourman, “Yarnell Hill,” and George’s rendition of Kurt Weill’s and Maxwell Anderson’s “September Song.
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” The former is homage to the firefighters battling the wildfires still raging in California. One of them never returns, and his wife laments that when he left, they never said good-bye.
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The color of those flames is echoed in September’s turning foliage, as the days grow short. Time passing and implied loss was thematically echoed in other songs as well, notably Brel’s “Chanson de vieux amants” (“Song of Old Lovers”).

Some Enchanted Evening ended on an optimistic note. Amanda’s beloved “The Rose” describes the encouraging paradox, that “Just remember, in the winter / far beneath the bitter snows / Lies the seed that with the sun’s love / In the spring becomes the rose.

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” Amanda and George encored on an equally upbeat and satisfying note: “Love Is Here to Stay.”

Amanda and George were accompanied by Michele Brourman on the piano and Jered Egan on bass. The show will reprise at 54 Below on October 14 at 7:30 PM.
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Barbara Leavy

Literary critic and author of books on literature, folklore and mythology, Barbara Leavy has been a contributor of features and reviews to Cabaret Scenes from the magazine’s earliest issues. Retired as a full professor of English at the City University of New York’s Queens College, she retains her honorary appointment as Adjunct Professor of English in Psychiatry at Cornell University’s Medical College. When not at cabaret, her current work in the realm of crime fiction. Barbara’s latest book, published by Poisoned Pen Press, is a second edition of The Fiction of Ruth Rendell—Ancient Tragedy and The Modern Family.