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Amanda McBroom releases new video to honor Sondheim’s 91st Birthday!

Posted at 7:27 am by Lee Lessack

Golden Globe Winner Amanda McBroom
Celebrates Stephen Sondheim’s Birthday
With New Single – Now Available on ALL Music Platforms

Golden Globe winning songwriter (The Rose), singer & actress Amanda McBroom marks the ninety first birthday of composer Stephen Sondheim by releasing a single of Send in the Clowns. Co-produced and arranged by long-time collaborator Michele Brourman and Stephan Oberhoff, the recording is a fresh take on Sondheim’s enduring classic from his 1973 musical “A Little Night Music”.

McBroom has a long history with the composer’s work going back to seeing “West Side Story” as a young performer. “It grabbed me by the heart and wouldn’t let me go. The simplicity of his lyrics against that lush Bernstein score and how they worked together so beautifully blew my mind. I hadn’t even started writing songs yet, but I knew that this was a lesson I’d use for the rest of my life,” says McBroom. She went on to portray two of the most memorable women in the Sondheim canon – Mrs. Lovett the murderous pie shop owner in Sweeny Todd and the glamorous actress Desiree Armfeldt in A Little Night music – two seemingly diametrically opposed characters. Surprisingly, she finds a common thread, “the shows spoke to both sides of my emotional color wheel, the incredibly elegant and the incredibly low down. Both are working women trying to survive in a masculine world, they both have unfulfilled romantic longings.” In fact, she claims, “both shows are love stories”

Working in Night Music was, “a joy because I got to spend all those rehearsals and performances in three-quarter time. There’s nothing like spending hours and hours in a waltz. You come home and you’re a happy person.” On recording what is certainly the show’s most well-known song, indeed perhaps one of the best-known musical theatre songs ever, McBroom says, “Aside from the fact that it is an exquisite piece of writing, for me personally I’m at a place where I’m looking more back at my career than forward, and it’s bittersweet.” Beyond the personal resonance she feels the song also has great meaning to the specific times we find ourselves living through, “I remember reading somewhere the term ‘send in the clowns’ comes from when there was a disaster at the circus – whenever somebody was injured or fell off the highwire- they’d say ‘quick send in the clowns. In this time of disaster, it seems very appropriate”.