McBROOM’S TWICE-SMITTEN HEART

It’s not unusual for a performer in the theater to do well as a writer for the theater, since the actor develops an ear for what will soar across a stage (Shakespeare is not a mean example). But it is unusual for an actor to maintain two healthy careers as a performer and a lyricist-composer, in a kind of perpetual aesthetic commuter life.

Amanda McBroom won a Grammy for her song “The Rose,” which would do almost anyone very nicely. But while the poetry and sensitivity of her songs make them natural candidates for the repertoire of classy chanteuses such as Betty Buckley and Barbara Cook, McBroom keeps on with an active career in the theater, which has ranged from regional outfits such as the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and San Francisco’s A.C.T., to Broadway and an international tour with the company of “Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris,” to playing Kate in “The Taming of the Shrew” two seasons ago at San Diego’s Old Globe.

McBroom blends both of her careers in “Heartbeats,” a new revue-style musical she wrote and appears in, which has just opened at the Matrix.

She was born in Burbank, the daughter of a movie actor father and a mother who was a drama coach. She studied theater at the University of Texas at Austin before going on to New York (“where everyone is so tense you have to put on a flak jacket to go out”). Her songwriting career was less premeditated.

“In college I was convinced I was a combination of Judy Collins and Joan Baez,” she said cheerily (McBroom is a very upbeat figure). “I knew how to play the guitar. I sang at chicken shows, outdoor events like that. One evening I felt pressured to write a song. I played it for my husband, (actor) George Ball. He said, ‘That’s good!’ and he seemed to mean it. I love words--my mom and dad were into word games.

“I’ve discovered that performing and writing go in cycles; when you’re ready to concentrate on one, you can’t really do the other, even though they’re extensions of each other. The idea for ‘Heartbeats’ started four years ago, when George, Sam Wiseman and me--we’d all been in ‘Jacques Brel’ together--were sitting around the dinner table one night drinking wine. A discussion about my songs went ‘they’re interesting but they’re not commercial. They’re theatrical.’

“That’s what started the idea for ‘Heartbeats.’ The show is my reflections on relationships in the ‘80s, on the faces of the heart. There are so many options available to people right now--permanent relationships, non-permanent, no relationships. I look at some of my peers who really want to get married--they feel unfulfilled without it; that’s the way they grew up. Younger people don’t feel the same need.

“At the same time, with all these options comes confusion. It’s not chic or trendy to confess deep involvement or feeling--we’ve all gotten very glib and polished and clever--but the heart remains untouched. What we need in this world is for our hearts to be touched again.”

McBroom appears in “Heartbeats” with George Ball, Mara Getz, Dan MacDonald and Stacey Lyn Shaffer. Bill Castellino directs.

Ralph Senenski, who graduated from the Pasadena Playhouse, directed “The Immoralist,” “Death of a Salesman” and “The Iceman Cometh,” among other heavyweight dramas, before moving into a TV career that spanned “The FBI,” the “Dynasty” pilot, “Star Trek” and most recently “The Paper Chase” series that ran on Show Time cable TV.

Senenski has wended his way back to the theater. Two years ago he directed “You Can’t Take It With You” at Theatre 40, and he’s back at the same place again with Lillian Hellman’s “Watch on the Rhine,” which opens Thursday.

He agrees with critics who consider the play dated, and is going with a revised version. “I didn’t want to do ‘The Little Foxes’ or ‘Another Part of the Forest,’ which are done and done and done,” he said. “She was a bit verbose, but she was working with a standard of theater that has changed quite a bit from then till now. The play is about fascism and about people, who don’t change. The theme for this play was sounded in ‘The Little Foxes,’ where she commented on the people who take and the people who sit there and watch them do it.”

A recent Stage Week item regarding the cast change for “Curse of the Starving Class” at the Tiffany implied that the initial cast walked out over dissatisfaction with director Roxanne Rogers. Rogers in turn was dissatisfied with the item and offers this rejoinder: “When we went into rehearsal, Eileen Brennan (one of the principals) wasn’t happy with the production. I think it was over working in Equity Waiver, where she expected better conditions. After a week of rehearsals, she took a movie job. Several others in the cast left with her, but not all the cast. Eileen made it clear that her leaving had nothing to do with me.”