Her Movie Song Made Life Rosy for Performer in Chapin Tribute

“Who do people think you are?”

“It all depends on where they know me from,” said Amanda McBroom, who is featured in “Lies and Legends: The Musical Stories of Harry Chapin,” at the Canon Theatre in Beverly Hills.

“If it’s from my past, they know me as an actress,” she said, referring to local appearances in “Hoagy, Bix and Bunkhaus” at the Taper and “Little Mary Sunshine” at the Odyssey. “If it’s people from the present, they think of me as a singer-songwriter. Basically, it comes down to people who knew me pre-’Rose’ and people who know me post-’Rose.’ ” The “Rose” in question is the title song of the 1979 Bette Midler movie. McBroom received a Grammy nomination and a Golden Globe award for writing the song.

“In the last few years the recording thing has been very lucrative--thank you, Lord--and rewarding, but it’s a brand new profession,” she said. “I had no idea it was going to happen. It truly just happened, fell out of the sky like Henny Penny. I still can’t believe it.”

Although she has often performed her own work (last year, she appeared in a theatrical collection of her love songs, “Heartbeats,” at the Matrix), McBroom said self-revelation has a price: “It can be terrifying to sing your own stuff, because you’re basically ripping open your chest and showing your heart to people, saying, ‘Here, this is what it looks like inside me. I hope you like it.’ ”

Even a number like “The Rose,” which she has performed hundreds of times, can still move her. “It’s one of the most wonderful things that’s happened in my life,” McBroom said unabashedly. “It is not the most beautiful song ever written--there are a lot more complicated and intricate ones--but it touches people’s hearts. So I’m very grateful to that song. I just hope in 30 years I’ll have five or six others that people will want to hear. But it’s fine with me if that’s the one. I never get bored with it.”

Sometimes McBroom is just as happy singing someone else’s music--in this case, a tribute to the work of the late singer-songwriter Harry Chapin. In its original 1980 incarnation, the show was essentially a revue. It has since been expanded and reshaped by director Sam Weisman.

The three actors who play Chapin (George Ball, John Herrera and Jerry Orbach) “represent different aspects of Harry’s personality: the father figure, the romantic guy and the bungler/comic figure,” Weisman said.

Weisman added that of the two women in the show (McBroom and Valerie Perri) “one is the earth mother and the other is the dream girl.”

“There’s a song we use as an emotional thread, ‘The Story of a Life,’ that connects the sections. It starts out with very simple story songs, moves into songs of romance, unrequited love and anger. The second half is the Americana section, with broader, more dramatic stories. Then it moves into the most emotional section, which is about family and children.”

When “Chapin” opened at the Pasadena Playhouse last August, it ran in repertory with “Jacques Brel Is . . .”--an emotional and theatrical experience that McBroom said was akin to “jumping into a hot fudge sundae all the time.” Beyond that, she said, “I have a lot of emotional spare change wrapped up in ‘Brel’ ”: 20 years ago, the show served as the introduction between McBroom and her husband (and current co-star) George Ball.

“I’d come down from the New York Shakespeare Festival and George was doing ‘Brel’ in San Francisco. I saw him in the show and said, ‘I’ve got to be in that show and I have to meet that man.’ The next day, there was an ad in the paper; they were auditioning to replace one of the women in the show. I went, got the job, met him--and we’ve been together ever since. The first night we performed at the Playhouse and George sang his solo, I started weeping. They had to physically restrain me.”

It’s not all tears and mushiness between this couple.

“We’ve got a pact going on between us, which is that as soon as we walk into the theater we become professionals,” McBroom said. “We try very hard not to bring the relationship to the theater. So I don’t nag, he doesn’t bully. I don’t tell him to take out the trash, he doesn’t tell me what to wear. We treat each other with a great deal of respect.”

And after the curtain goes down?

“We have a glass of wine, then we go home--and George takes out the trash.”