‘Laura Benanti: Nobody Cares’ ─ Starring & Created by Laura Benanti; Directed by Annie Tippe; Music Direction & Songs Co-Written by Todd Almond. At the Calderwood Pavilion, 527 Tremont St., Boston, MA. Performances October 22-25. For more information and tickets, go to: https://www.huntingtontheatre.org/whats-on/laura-benanti-nobody-cares/
By Mike Hoban
Laura Benanti brings her one-woman show, Nobody Cares, to the Calderwood Pavilion in the Boston Center for the Arts (BCA) for five shows October 22-25. This is Theater Mirror’s second interview with the actor-singer-writer-Tony® Award-winner. Our first interview is well worth a read as it explores her early life in theater, her gratitude for being “lucky” enough to do theater, TV, and movies, and a preview of her long-running, intermittent show, An Evening with Tony Laura Benanti. This interview focuses on her current show, Nobody Cares, a night of comedy featuring her take on motherhood, people-pleasing, and the joys of aging, with original songs written by her and her longtime musical collaborator, Todd Almond.
Theater Mirror: As I confessed in our previous interview, I’ve never seen any of your work on Broadway. I know you mostly from your terrific one-woman shows and TV. That includes your segments on Late Night with Steven Colbert as Melania Trump. Before we talk about the upcoming Boston show, Nobody Cares, I need to ask: With the infuriating cancellation of Stephen’s show, how much are you going to miss playing Melania?
Laura: I’m going to miss it a ton. Being on that show and acting with Stephen, making him laugh and break, was one of my favorite things to do.
Theater Mirror: I think what made it so funny was that you really pulled out all the stops and went way over the top with the character.
Laura: Yeah, it took a while to morph into that. In the beginning, it was much more true to her behavior. Then over the course of time, we sort of made this version of Melania who is like the American people, in that she’s reluctantly married to Donald Trump, and that she hates him as much as we do, and that she’s like secretly friends with Steven. So she became much more of a Borscht Belt comedian over the course of it, and it was just so much fun. They gave me so much freedom, and I learned too that if I didn’t give away the physical comedy that I added into a lot of the bits, if I didn’t do that during rehearsal and I surprised Stephen in the performance, then I could really break him and make him laugh.
Honestly, playing that character is what had people taking me seriously as a comic. That opened up a lot of doors for me in terms of people realizing that I’m funny and that I can do sketches and impressions, but mostly I miss the people. I did it for 10 years, and I just loved the people.
Theater Mirror: Is there any chance of that character popping up anywhere else?
Laura: I mean, I do her on my Instagram. I do her in the concerts where I sing Broadway songs, but I don’t do her in my comedy show.
Theater Mirror: Before this interview, I checked out your IMDB and saw that last year you were doing a series, Mayor of Kingstown, with Edie Falco. I figured that with you in it, it would be a lighthearted comedy, but when I checked out the trailer, it was this bleak, darkly shot show set inside a prison. Are you shifting gears to more dramatic roles?
Laura: I feel really lucky that I get to do all sorts of genres. It’s rare to be able to do Broadway musicals, Broadway plays, and Broadway comedies and dramas. Then on TV, I do a lot of comedy, but I’ve also done a lot of dramas. If anything, the career shift that’s happening for me right now is this comedy show, Nobody Cares. It’s most akin to stand-up comedy.
Theater Mirror: That’s funny. When I heard the name of the show, Nobody Cares, I thought it sounded like the title of a stand-up comic’s tour.
Laura: The show is like stand-up comedy. It’s autobiographical, with comedy songs that I co-wrote with Todd Almond, who is my songwriting partner and my music director.
Theater Mirror: Where does the title of the show come from?
I mean, honestly, when I started writing it, the self-deprecating part of me, or the insecure part of me, was like, “What are you doing? Nobody cares. Why are you writing this?” And so it was a voice I had to constantly battle and say (to myself), “People will care about it. It will mean something to people. And it has, and it continues to, which is wonderful.
But then also it sort of morphed into this idea of, gosh, things that used to torture me as a young person, like “Am I pretty enough? Am I thin enough? Am I successful enough? Does that person like me?” Nobody cares! Everybody’s thinking about themselves. People are not thinking about me nearly as much as I think they are. And so the mantra of Nobody Cares actually became a powerful and positive one for me.
Theater Mirror: So it’s not like the An Evening with Tony Award Winner Laura Benanti shows?
Laura: No. It’s not cabaret at all. It’s not me singing ballads from musicals, and it’s not like a concert. It’s stand-up. Which I do think is confusing for people. I’d say there are at least 20 people, every show, who come thinking it’s going to be a musical, that I’m going to be playing the sort of wide-eyed ingenue that they’re used to me playing. Instead, this show is 16-plus. It’s adult content, adult language. I’m talking about being a recovering ingenue and sort of unraveling all of the nonsense that you’re taught as an ingenue, and how my biggest mistakes as a young person came from people-pleasing.
I broke my neck because I didn’t want anybody to be mad at me when they asked me to do a pratfall down a flight of stairs. I should have said no, but I said yes because I didn’t want people to be mad at me. Every man who asked me out as a young person, I said ‘yes’, even if I didn’t want to, because I didn’t want to hurt their feelings. Everything was, “I don’t want to hurt people’s feelings; I don’t want people to be mad at me; I want people to like me,” and this show is an unraveling of that.
I also talk about how a big part of that recovery has been my children. Because it can’t be my children’s job to like me all of the time, and it’s my job not to need them to like me. That has been a tremendous freedom for me, even in the rest of my life and career, where I can’t give them what I don’t have. So I have to do the work; I have to do the work to grow into the mindset of, “I am an adult person, and I am allowed to say no, thank you.” I’m allowed to set boundaries. I’m allowed to be clear and kind, but I don’t have to do everything everyone wants me to do or be the way that people expect me to be, and so that’s what I bring on stage, and I think that could be surprising for people.
Theater Mirror: So how is the show structured?
Laura: There’s no formality. I definitely communicate with the audience. There’s call and response. And while it’s scripted ─ for sure, I wrote it ─ that’s like a map. I always take side streets. It’s stand-up comedy, and it is sharp-elbowed. It’s not polite. I am who I am. I’m a kind person, so I don’t punch down, ever. I’m extremely self-deprecating, but I also talk about things that women don’t talk about a lot ─ getting older, perimenopause, childbirth, postpartum depression, ageism… all sorts of stuff that could make people uncomfortable. But I do it through the lens of humor because I think people are better able to digest what you’re saying if their hearts are open because they’re laughing.
But most importantly, I just wanna make people laugh. We are living in such an insane time. I just want to be in the same room with my people, all of our hearts beating at the same time, and just make them laugh.
For more information about the show and to purchase tickets, go to: https://www.huntingtontheatre.org/whats-on/laura-benanti-nobody-cares/
