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Laura Benanti’s present “Nobody Cares,” on the Minetta Lane Theater, is being recorded and can quickly be accessible from the consolation of your private home. Future audiences are prone to take pleasure in Benanti’s autobiographical romp by means of her household life, her romantic {and professional} travails, her insecurities (see the title) and her usually overwhelming have to please. They will respect the handful of authentic songs, which she wrote with the music director Todd Almond — Benanti is a superb singer, with a Tony Award on her mantel for her sultry flip as Louise in “Gypsy.”
But as a result of the present might be on Audible, these audiences might be made up of listeners, and they’ll miss out on the bodily comedy of a girl who can talk extra with one raised eyebrow than most actors can with a prolonged monologue. Benanti dramatically throws herself on the ground through the quantity “Give It to Me” earlier than effortlessly slithering again up. This is likely to be an exorcism of the time she broke her neck whereas doing a pratfall as Cinderella within the 2002 revival of “Into the Woods.”
Did that accident make her change her reflexive compliance? Nope: “There wasn’t a robust sufficient neck brace on the earth that might have stored me from nodding ‘sure’ to one thing I strongly disagreed with,” she says within the present.
That Benanti is a terrific all-around comedienne received’t shock those that have seen, say, the musical “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown,” her impersonation of Melania Trump on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,” or movies just like the one through which she reimagined the obsessive Fosca from Stephen Sondheim’s “Passion” as a Times Square mascot. Now she’s exploring new-ish terrain in an evening-length present, directed by Annie Tippe, that stands out from her previous solo tasks by relying extra on narration and embracing a confessional mode. The normal strategy is just a little paying homage to Sherie Rene Scott’s “Everyday Rapture,” from 2009 (although that piece had extra songs, they usually have been covers).
After a starting that feels stiffly self-conscious, Benanti loosens into her comedic rhythm and packs so much into 90 minutes: a childhood as a theater nerd, three marriages, two daughters, perimenopause, taking pictures a nude scene in a current status TV collection. The manufacturing’s largest missed alternative may lie in how little Benanti interacts with Almond, who leads the five-piece band and sometimes pipes up with impeccably timed rejoinders, or along with her backup singers, Barrie Lobo McLain and Chelsea Lee Williams.
She is very skillful at navigating self-deprecation, a difficult mode that may come throughout as disingenuous humble-bragging when well-known folks do it. “I’m a completely accredited Broadway star,” she says. Pause. “We use the time period ‘star’ loosely within the theater. Sort of how folks in Hollywood use the time period ‘good good friend.’”
Things are bumpiest when Benanti talks about motherhood. Gush is adjoining to mush, and the actress’s acerbic one-liners can’t fairly minimize the sentimentality that creeps into the present’s final third. Still, “Nobody Cares” factors to a brand new stage — in each senses of the phrase — for Benanti as a performer and as a girl: Her people-pleasing drive nonetheless entails entertaining audiences, however she’s standing up for herself now.
Laura Benanti: Nobody Cares
Through June 2 on the Minetta Lane Theater, Manhattan; audible.com. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes.
