“My name is Laura Benanti and…”
Nobody cares! responds a chorus of amplified voices.
“I’ve starred in eleven Broadway shows, I won a Tony Award…”
Nobody cares! chime back those voices. Which turn out to be Laura Benanti’s very much present “inner demons.”
“I do a Melania Trump impression…”
Nobody cares!
At age 19, Benanti set the mold as Broadway’s favorite ingenue, since Barbara Cook anyway, when she took over the starring role in the 1998 revival of The Sound of Music. (The role was written to order for the 46-year-old Mary Martin, yes; but the real Maria von Trapp was actually a teenaged governess.) Benanti has been an audience favorite ever since, working in varied media including a notable stint on late night television. She has always returned to the stage, though, with such dedication that she once broke her neck doing Sondheim. Literally so, with an unreasonably dangerous pratfall in the 2002 revival of Into the Woods.
Nobody cares! the sound system keeps firing back at Benanti. But she’s wrong; we, the audience—her audience—do care.
[Read Frank Scheck’s ★★★★☆ review here.]
Benanti originated Nobody Cares as an Audible project in February, recording the show over a sold-out three-performance run at the Minetta Lane. Now, Audible has brought her back for three additional weeks to celebrate the audiobook release and as an opportunity for her fans to see her perform the show live. Or at least as many fans as can pack the intimate Minetta. Yes, this project was apparently devised as audio entertainment; but Benanti, in person, knows how to work the room and the stage. Which she does from the moment she bounds in front of the curtain, dressed in shocking pink. Or is it pepto pink?
An accomplished humorist in her own right, Benanti wrote the script for Nobody Cares. After a self-deprecating opening, the star proceeds to break the ingenue mold in which she has been trapped for decades; breaking the mold, in fact, is the plot subject of her 90-minute discourse with songs. She talks about boy-men, husbands, divorces, child-bearing, child-raising, obstetrics, and more. Some of her fans might prefer to think of her, still, as the perfect musical comedy ingenue. Benanti, though, goes to great lengths to demonstrate that her ingenue days are gone.
If she has finally managed to shed her ingenue skin, her innate stage smarts and robust sense of comedy are in no way diminished and likely to remain in evidence. She dwells repeatedly on that word, “ingenue.” One of the songs which fill out the evening—all of which were written by Benanti and music director Todd Almond—goes “What is an ingenue to do when she grows older? / They send her away to sing ‘Glitter and Be Gay.’”
Wisely, she does not interrupt the narrative to sing any of those songs she sang in The Sound of Music, Into the Woods, Gypsy, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, My Fair Lady, or She Loves Me. As much as we would enjoy hearing her revisit her highlights, that would be a very different sort of show.
Almond is at the piano, singing along as needed and leading a six-piece band; the cast is rounded out by two personable backup singers, Barrie Lobo McLain and Chelsea Lee Williams. Annie Trippe directed, with “dots” as scenic consultant, Japhy Weideman designing the lighting, and Connor Wang on the sound.
Nobody Cares is very much The Laura Benanti Show. Nobody cares, we are told repeatedly. But everybody—at least, anyone who heads down to Minetta Lane over the rest of the month—is likely to care, very much indeed.
Laura Benanti: Nobody Cares opened May 12, 2024, at the Minetta Lane Theatre and runs through June 2. Tickets and information: audible.com
