Laura Benanti has been enchanting Broadway audiences for several decades now, and London has this week been let in on the secret that recently charmed playgoers at this summer's Edinburgh Festival: the comedienne perhaps best known in some circles for her wicked impersonations of Melania Trump can hold her own in a solo show that mixes self-deprecation and determination in equal measure.
The first quality is there in the show's faintly damning subtitle, Nobody Cares, which was offered up by one of Benanti's two young daughters - her children so clearly the apple of their mother's eye that you may feel as if you have come to know them by the time the 65-minute performance nears its close. Seen Off Broadway prior to Edinburgh and this subsequent one-night London gig, this same performance has been recorded for Audible. The hope is for a longer London stand at some point: let's drink to that.
On the face of it, you might assume something demure, even innocent to Benanti, now 46, whose father, Martin Vidnovic, I saw on Broadway some 40 or so years ago fronting a rare revival of Brigadoon. In fact, Benanti has been around, and has the scars to show for it, as well as some astonishing stories.
She seems as surprised as anyone to report that she has essentially not been single since she was 18: now on husband number three (her second was the Broadway actor, Steven Pasquale), Benanti is hilarious recording the reactions to that news from couples whom she finds herself auditioning (her word) as possible friends. Having won a Tony for her achingly moving Louise opposite Patti LuPone's Rose in Gypsy when still in her twenties, she presents herself as "a four-time Tony loser": so, is her glass half empty or full?
Certainly, there's pathos, and more, to be mined from the story of her star-making turn in the first-ever Broadway revival of Into the Woods, in which her Cinderella was singled out for raves even as Benanti suffered a broken neck one performance as the result of a pratfall - about which she was urged to keep quiet. (I remember the fake news doing the rounds in New York at the time about her lack of professionalism, which disguised the more disquieting news of her injury.)
Cast as Maria in The Sound of Music when only 18, Benanti dazzled audiences with her lyric soprano, at the same time catching the attention of a producer who offered to install her in luxury accommodation overlooking Central Park. Benanti quite rightly declined.
You might expect an evening given over to covers from Rodgers and Hammerstein and Sondheim and some of the other Broadway greats on whom Benanti has shaped her career: Bock and Harnick, for instance, whose She Loves Me was tailor-made for Benanti's capacious upper register. Ditto, for that matter, the role of Eliza in My Fair Lady at Lincoln Center, in which she replaced Lauren Ambrose and sent Lerner and Loewe's wondrous score soaring.
Instead, Benanti and her musicians, the inestimable Todd Almond chief among them, provide a series of autobiographical segues through the seriocomic path that has led to her status just now. We hear of her anxiety taping a nude scene for TV that ended up being cut and of her self-assessment as "a pathological people pleaser", which at least has the upside of allowing her untrammeled access to an audience's emotions via her art.
There are accounts of men good and bad, alongside a brief snippet of "Send in the Clowns" (wouldn't Benanti be luxury casting in that role), not to mention the seven lactation consultants she ended up hiring so as to breastfeed one of her daughters, who are ages three and eight. She speaks, deadpan, of her vagina as "the portal to greatness" and of the frightening absurdity of classroom drills undertaken by her eldest daughter lest the girl's New Jersey school be subject to a shooter. (The class is told to be on the lookout for squirrels, as one way, presumably, of not spreading panic.)
Throughout, you sense a sly social satirist co-existing with a fully assured actress-singer who has carved a separate TV niche for herself in shows like Gossip Girl and The Gilded Age. These are indeed strange and often scary times, as Benanti acknowledges at the start, but Nobody Cares derives from the keen sensibility of someone who cares a helluva lot. Some people let life pass them by without commentary, but not Benanti. This woman has clearly taken a life lesson from Momma Rose's first exhortation to her daughter near the start of Gypsy: "Sing out, Louise," the child is encouraged, and the wise adult in Benanti is in every way doing precisely that.
- Laura Benanti: Nobody Cares is available on Audible
- More theatre reviews on theartsdesk
