Laura Benanti Connects with her Inner Ingenue in Nobody Cares

Laura Benanti presented her wildly audacious memoir Nobody Cares at the Calderwood Pavilion this past weekend.

By Robert Nesti

Sure-voiced and quick-witted, Laura Benanti describes herself as a “one-time Tony winner and four-time Tony loser, and an actress on 38 television shows you don’t care about.”* Such self-deprecating humor goes a long way in her 70-minute autobiographical show Nobody Cares that the Huntington Theatre brought to the Calderwood Pavilion this past weekend. In a show that was a hit off-Broadway, in London and at the Edinburgh Fringe, Benanti turns the standard show-biz solo piece on its ear by simply leaving the show biz out.

Well, not completely — she mentions how at 19, she made her Broadway debut as Maria in The Sound of Music opposite a 70-year-old Captain Von Trapp, which does sound pretty icky, and explains how Cinderella’s pratfall in the 2002 Into the Woods revival caused her to break her back. These allusions, though, are part of her larger goal of using her stage time to delve into her personal history with unusual candor and a willingness to be the butt of the jokes. This is especially true when discussing her two daughters, who, though both under 10, can dismiss her with a withering one-liner. As for that broken back, she proved it is a thing of the past with some demanding dance moves.

Getting to the subject of her daughters and her current husband (her third) makes up the show’s trajectory. Its first part follows her dating history, which includes a come-on from a wealthy producer when she was 19: if she agreed to be his mistress, he would put her up in an apartment overlooking Central Park. Her reply was to say she had diarrhea — nonsensical, but evasive enough to have succeeded. She jokes a lot about sex and her vagina to the point that at the show’s end she apologized to the gay men in the audience for mentioning it so much. (Thank you, but no apology necessary.) And her singalong moment came with a lyric about men showing their penises without permission. Those expecting Benanti to sing something from My Fair Lady (where she replaced Lauren Ambrose at Lincoln Center) were in for a shock.

At the core of the show is her need for approval and wanting to be liked, which she says accounts for the number of man-boys she dated over the years. When one proposes, she goes to ridiculous ends not to hurt his feelings by saying she couldn’t because she had cancer. Hoping to make amends to him years later, she reaches out on social media only to get the response, “LOL, you’re going to hell / But sorry your name doesn’t ring a bell.”

She does marry — three times — but in discussing them she barely touches upon the specifics of her failed marriages, instead focusing on how she happily landed in a stable one that has lasted for 12 years. She mines the shame of being thrice-married with a funny bit about how people react when she tells them, and she doubles down on that shame with another section about a humiliating visit to New York City Hall to get a marriage license only to be sent to the bowels of another building to secure her divorce certificates (both of them).

There’s a sweetness to the show’s final third, where marriage and menopause are the subjects, and you sense that if Benanti weren’t in such a secure place, it would have been impossible for her to do the show in the first place, proving that recovery for a Broadway ingenue (as she labels herself) is possible. Directed in a loose, easy fashion by Annie Tippe, Nobody Cares features a series of pop-styled original songs by Benanti and Todd Almond, her accompanist of 20 years, that rise out of her routines and are delivered in a full-throttle style. Given that the songs are just extensions of punch lines, she doesn’t fully show her extensive vocal skills. Maybe she will return sometime with an evening of Stephen Sondheim (she confesses she was obsessed with him at 13), one that could highlight her Broadway diva style. Or perhaps she should build a solo piece around Melania Trump, whom she impersonated with uncanny accuracy on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Imagine Melania singing “Send in the Clowns.”

* As for her television shows the audience doesn’t care about, there are two that I did. First, as the wealthy widow Susan Blane, who plays cougar to young architect Larry Russell (Harry Richardson) on The Gilded Age. She hires him to redesign her Newport home and seduces him along the way in a delightful cameo. And on the Max guilty pleasure, the reboot of Gossip Girl, where she played Kiki Hope, the mother of series regular Audrey Hope, with a clichéd story arc that Benanti made fresh by simply being her vivacious self.

For more on Laura Benanti, visit her webpage.