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Laura Benanti is out of the woods and into a thicket that is very different from her initial Broadway base: the world of stand-up comedy. Officially, “Laura Benanti: Nobody Cares” is a “one-woman show,” but she says
the only reason she shies away from calling it stand-up at all is because she respects the people who practice that on a weekly basis too much to want to claim she’s mastered that craft as an interloper. But whatever the comedic equivalent of belting is, that’s a natural skill that Benanti is also turning out to have in her wheelhouse, as she carries the art of quip-riddled personal storytelling as well as she carries a tune.
“Nobody Cares,” which plays at the Wallis in Beverly Hills Thursday through Sunday and moves to Costa Mesa’s South Coast Repertory the following weekend, is not tuneless, so anyone who first came to love Benanti as a Broadway songbird needn’t worry her vocal cords have been clipped for this production. But the handful of songs she works into this current show are all original numbers, conceived in the same mostly irreverent vein as the spoken-word parts that dominate the show. Zero knowledge or prior appreciation is required of her rich history as the breakout starlet powering shows like “The Sound of Music,” “Nine,” “My Fair Lady,” “She Loves Me” and “Into the Woods.” The so-called reformed ingenue is now prepared to tackle middle-aged topics like divorce (in multiples), postpartum depression and the tricky art of balancing self-deprecation and personal pride, via deft writing that suggests maybe she ought to be co-writing her own musical comedies, if she takes a pause from this confessional vein.
Variety spoke with Benanti about why “Nobody Cares” has been so rewarding for someone who has already received two and a half decades of applause for her stage work… and also, in a peculiar wrinkle, a lot of love (well, from some) for her portrayal of Melania Trump on “Late Night With Stephen Colbert.” The show has been a hit in New York and London,
Most people would see “Nobody Cares” and think that you were a very practiced stand-up comedy person, which was never your history prior to conceiving this. it’s been something that was buried latent in you for a long time. Not that this strictly counts as stand-up comedy, but certainly a lot of it is in that sphere or involves those skills.
Yeah, I would say this show is most akin to stand-up, for sure, and with some good musical comedy in there as well. We have five original songs that I co-wrote with Todd Almond, who’s on stage with me. It’s certainly comedic storytelling. Something I talk about is, I really want people to understand that this is not like a cabaret. This is not Broadway songs or Broadway music in any way. It’s 16-plus (age-wise). There’s adult content; there’s foul language. It’s not what people might expect of me if they only know me from my roles on Broadway.
Looking at previous interviews you’ve done when you went out with this show, you get those disclaimers in pretty early toward the start of most interviews. You really want to get that message out. That must come from having had a few surprised customers.
Yeah. I still always have, I’m gonna say, at least 15 people in the audience who are like, “Where am I? Why isn’t she singing ‘The Sound of Music’?” And it does take a little while to win them over, because they don’t want to hear me sing a song about dicks. They’re just like, “What’s going on?”
Have you had any walkouts over the dicks, and/or the lack of “Into the Woods” content?
Nobody has left. Well, at least that I could see. Maybe the people in the back have. But nobody’s left. But they certainly have scowled.
Presumably the scowlers come around eventually? But not everything is for everybody.
I mean, even the most reluctant husband or boyfriend who got dragged there, by the end of the show, I do feel like I’ve won them over. And for whatever reason, this makes me really happy. My audiences have been, for the most part, really intergenerational, from teenagers to women in their 20s and 30s and 40s all the way through to people in the audience who are in their 80s, and likely they are the people coming knowing me from Broadway. But everybody seems to really enjoy it, and it’s really nice to see all of those people in one place at the same time laughing at the same things.
You’ve been doing other things where people discover your sense of humor. But the people who know you most for the ingenue characters you talk about having been put it early in your theater career, they wouldn’t have reason to naturally make that leap, like, “I can just tell that lady has a really wicked sense of humor.”
Right. That’s been sort of an uphill battle. But certainly I think even in the ingénues I’ve played, I’ve always tried to pepper in humor wherever I can find it, and to mine humor at any moment, even if it’s not on the page. I’ve done that since I was 18, playing Maria in “The Sound of Music.” That was always a big goal of mine. But I do think that the repertoire certainly that I had till I was 30 was for the most part ingénues. But I think “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown,” even though that closed early and wasn’t a big hit, educated a lot of people in the Broadway community to the fact that I’m a clown. And I always have been. I’m sort of like a clown that was in an ingenue leading lady’s body.
And I think doing Melania really helped with that. People realized that I could do sketch comedy and impressions. But I know I’m not the only performer who feels that you just have to sort of keep showing people who you are. Because if you do a lot of different things, like musicals and plays and comedy and drama… it’s harder for people to put you in a box of, this is what you do… I constantly have people be like, “I didn’t know you were funny.” It used to piss me off, and now I’m like, “Yeah, you didn’t, and it’s my job to show you that I am.”
This show came about from Audible asking you to write and perform an autobiographical piece. So did wanting to do something like this come out of that assignment, or were you always like, “Someday I’m gonna put my own voice out there, whether it’s with a comic sensibility or something else, where I will be as great being myself as I’ve been being an interpreter as I’ve been of other people’s voices”?
Well, you know, I’ve done these Broadway concerts since I was 22, all over the country, where I would go to wherever and sing Broadway music and then do stories in-between. And the feedback I would often get is people saying, “I loved the stand-up. The stand-up was actually my favorite part.” But I think I was always just too scared to do that outside of the context of the career I had already had — the safety of singing songs that people expect of me. Then I started hosting a bunch of (events) and writing the monologues and and a lot of the bits, and it was so fun. I love the puzzle of a joke. Especially if it’s something that is a serious topic, I love figuring out how to talk about it in a way that makes people laugh and disarm them. So when Audible reached out to me about commissioning a show, I immediately said yes, because I had already been wanting to do that. But then as I started writing it, I just kept thinking, “Nobody cares. Nobody cares what a middle-aged white lady has to say. This is not the voice that we’re clamoring for.” But they paid me, so I had to keep writing.
And slowly, I allowed myself to feel the joy of the puzzle. And I have some really wonderful girlfriends who would come to my makeshift garage and listen to me do jokes and give feedback. And they were like, “I need to hear this, actually. You can be as self-deprecating and as insecure as you want, but what you’re saying is something I actually really need and want to hear, even outside of my friendship with you.” So that gave me courage and solace as I continued to write it. Now that I’m touring with it, I’m seeing that, and that’s still the feedback that I’m getting from audiences, which is really, really gratifying.
You know what’s so weird is, before X was X, when it was just Twitter and it was fun instead of just the dumpster fire of misogyny that it is now, I really got into it, because the puzzle of having to deliver a joke in 140 characters was really fun for me. I do think that’s where a lot of people started to realize I was funny. I noticed a lot of comics started following me, and I started having back-and-forth bantering with them. People who did not know anything about me at all started following me on Twitter. In some ways, that helped me more than anything, weirdly. And now, I get to do it.
And I still feel self-conscious about calling it stand-up because I have so much respect for stand-ups, that they have such a hard job. They work so hard, and I do sometimes worry that they’re gonna be like, “Oh, OK, Miss Broadway, Miss ‘I’ve never played a small club.’ You’re a stand-up comic. OK.” But I don’t know how better to describe what I’m doing than that, especially when I’m trying to set expectations for the audience of what it is.
Were you ever tempted to work more inside-baseball theater stories into the show? Because in interviews you have some hilarious stories about old-timers you’ve worked with and stuff like that. But that’s not the theme of this show. This is about pretty common experiences, or at least exaggerated versions of experiences that have actually happened to you. So you’re talking about perimenopause when you could be sharing theater anecdotes. But you’ve prioritized the most universal stuff.
Yeah. My intention with this show is to broaden my audience. Of course I want to keep my core musical theater fans; I owe my career to them. But I want to broaden my fan base, and the thing I always say is, you don’t have to know anything about Broadway. You don’t have to like Broadway. One of the lines in my show is, “I want to give a very special welcome to those of you who were dragged here by someone who said, ‘I know you don’t like Broadway, but I think you’ll like her.'” And so my goal with this show is to use it as almost a Trojan horse of, “Hey, everybody, this is what I’m capable of…” And when I do my more Broadway-style concerts, I definitely have theater anecdotes because that’s what that audience really wants to hear. But for me, I want this to be more universal, and not that I’m an actress doing a comedy show. I’m a person telling you stories about my life — which, unfortunately, are not actually that exaggerated. The stories you hear in my show, sadly, are true.
There are moments in the show where you’re very deadpan about how you do the lead-in to the punchline, and the punchline is you delivering the really terrible thing that happened to you, or the shocking secret. And there’s a great comic rhythm to it, even though what you’re talking about is not inherently funny. You’ve actually said that a lot of this is about the worst experiences of your life. Did you have any questions with yourself about whether to go sort of full vulnerability as far as dealing with everything — from beimg twice divorced and making the third time the charm, to breaking your neck, perimenopause and postpartum depression? The lightheartedness of it doesn’t really stop, even though you’re getting into heavy material.
You know, that’s like my mom coming through…
Whose approach to finding levity in everything you have talked about. You once described your mother’s approach to finding laughter in the worst circumstances as “giggles at a funeral.”
And I will say that a lot of these stories have the benefit of hindsight. At the time they weren’t funny, but in retrospect they are. I think that challenging topics feel more accessible to people when they’re laughing, and can make a greater impact, because laughter opens our hearts, and then once a heart is open, you can sort of slip in the message.
But, like when I was in London, I definitely felt this sense of how my open-hearted, “I wear my heart on my sleeve” (attitude), especially as it pertains to my children, was not as welcome as it is in the States. Which was interesting to feel. There’s a song on my show called “Mama’s a Liar.” The first two sections of the song are comedic, and then the last one is very genuine. And I could almost feel people’s discomfort in London, that during a comedy show I’m singing something emotional. But in the States it’s people’s favorite song. So it’s been interesting to me to see who is ready, willing and able to go on a journey with a comedy show that occasionally has some heartfelt moments. You know, Mike Birbiglia does that in such a masterful way. One of the reasons why I’m such a big fan of his is not only am I laughing, but he’s making me feel something and think about things.
Do you have a final feeling you want to leave people with, when they come out?
Hmm. I’ve spent a lot of my time feeling a lot of shame about the stories I talk about — and what a waste of time. So I want to make them laugh, and I want them to walk away being like, “Yeah, I’m fine.”
Let’s talk about your Melania Trump, which oddly enough is something through which a lot of people have learned about you for the first time. Will you find a place to do it again, or was that specific to the Colbert show?
I mean, it’s so synonymous, (so) I do it a little bit in my theater concerts. I do a medley, as her. And I’ve done it a bit on my Instagram, but I’m not sure where else I would do it, you know? I’m not sure where I’d go with it.
MAGA was kind of mad at you…
Uh, yeah.
But at the same time, you got a huge aount of very positive response for doing that. So how did that work out for you, with this whole world applauding you for this, and then knowing people are pissed off too? Because a big component of the show you’re doing now is that you have always been a people pleaser.
Exactly. I was just gonna say that, the people-pleasing thing. And then I was like, “You know what? Fine. I don’t want these people to feel comfortable with me.” You know, I had some followers be like, “Stick to singing. I liked you, now I don’t.” And I’m like, “I’m sorry I ever made this a safe space for you. Goodbye.” So I do not shy away from my belief system. If that loses me followers, if that loses me fans, I feel like I’m on the right side of history. But it certainly was scary at times. But that’s for the most part died down. And look, it makes me practice what I preach in this show, which is: Not everybody’s gonna love you, and that’s fine.
That recurring bit helped set up for people that you have these comedic chops, and you might be exercising them, with a comic sensibility that might be off the beaten track.
Exactly. And for the people who know me, or have a preconceived notion of who I am, my hope is that they open themselves to this version of me that’s the real part of me. And I hope that people who don’t know me at all will come and enjoy themselves, and I can introduce myself to them as the person I’ve always been. You know, as the recovering ingenue, not the ingenue.
I may be a little strange, but I’m watching the show and thinking, “Oh, I liked her opm Broadway, but she’s so good at this. She should just do this. She should just do comedy all the time.”
I’d love to do that!
WIll you continue touring this show into next year and beyond?
Yeah. But we did film it, in London, and so my hope is that we’ll be able to get a distributor for it, and it’ll be out in the world in some capacity. And frankly, like, I would like to do this forever. I love theater — I’ll always do theater — but my goal with this show is to show people that I’m funny, and especially in L.A., get [00:27:00] people to hire me for comedy. My absolute dream is to be on a television comedy and just get to go to work and laugh all the time, and continue to write more of these shows and tour them. I really love it. It brings me the most joy of anything I do.
Any quick synopsis of what else is happening in your professional life? You’ve done so much television.
I’m on “Mayor of Kingstown,” which is coming back; I’m not sure when. But I am a free agent, so anyone who would like to hire me is welcome to hire me.
This would not be the first time that pronouncement has been made in Variety.
Yes, please. Exactly. “Dear Hollywood.”
“Laura Benanti: Nobody Cares” will be performed five times at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, located at 9390 N. Santa Monica Blvd. in Beverly Hills: Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights at 7:30 p.m., and Saturday and Sunday afternoons at 2 p.m. Tickets and other information can found online at thewallis.org or 310-746-4000. Following the Beverly Hills engagement, Benanti will also perform at Orange County’s South Coast Repertory from Oct. 8-11. Tickets for that run are available at scr.org.
