Deborah Stone
Here I Am!
The Triad, NYC, July 21, 2021
Reviewed by Ron Forman
Deborah Stone’s elegant look, stylized vocals, and demeanor on stage classify her as a chanteuse. Her extremely well-thought-out show Here I Am! intelligently uses more than a dozen songs taken from the Broadway stage to tell her life story in a very charming manner. Each number is directly related to an event in her life on and off the stage. Stone has a lovely sound, and every number in the show is done in her unique manner. She often interspersed funny anecdotes in her patter that had the audience laughing.
Her music director John Cook’s work on the piano was perfectly matched to her singing style.
Stone opened with a very slow “Let’s Face the Music and Dance” which set the stage for what was to follow. She then used a different vocal quality to invoke laughter with “Life Upon the Wicked Stage,” using that song as a vehicle to hilariously describe her first professional experience at the Club Versailles where she was surrounded on stage by 10 nude females. Her account of what she experienced during her 10 months in the cast of La Cage aux Folles led into a delightful medley from the show. Her story about finding and then losing love, unfolded dramatically with “Comes Love” followed by “Guess Who I Saw Today.” She then movingly performed a medley of “Why Did I Choose You” and “Just to Look at Him” to describe her meeting and falling in love with her husband. She closed the show with her title song “Here I Am” from the show Spirit of the Cimarron, which included the line “You made my dreams come true.” Her encore was a dramatically performed “Dancing in the Dark.”
