Laura Benanti Trades Broadway Belting for Stand-Up in 'Nobody Cares'

Laura Benanti has spent two and a half decades earning applause on Broadway. This week she is chasing a different kind of laugh.

"Laura Benanti: Nobody Cares" plays five performances at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills, at 9390 N. Santa Monica Blvd., running Thursday through Sunday, with evening shows at 7:30 p.m. Thursday through Saturday and 2 p.m. matinees Saturday and Sunday. The production then moves to South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa from Oct. 8-11.

Officially, the show is billed as a one-woman show. Benanti herself hedges on calling it stand-up — out of respect, she says, for comics who grind out the craft weekly. "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," she told Variety. "But I don't know how better to describe what I'm doing than that."

Audiences expecting the breakout star of "The Sound of Music," "Nine," "My Fair Lady," "She Loves Me" and "Into the Woods" should adjust their expectations. The show is 16-plus, with adult content and foul language. Benanti co-wrote five original songs with Todd Almond, who joins her on stage, but there are no Broadway standards.

"I really want people to understand that this is not like a cabaret," Benanti said. "This is not Broadway songs or Broadway music in any way."

She has learned to issue that disclaimer early. "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"?'" she said. "They don't want to hear me sing a song about dicks. They're just like, 'What's going on?'"

Nobody has walked out, she reports. Some have scowled. Even the reluctant husbands and boyfriends get won over by the end.

The material is drawn from Benanti's own life: two divorces, a broken neck, perimenopause, postpartum depression. She calls the stories, "sadly... true." Her mother's approach to humor — "giggles at a funeral," as Benanti once described it — shaped the show's tonal strategy of slipping sincerity inside comedy.

"I think that challenging topics feel more accessible to people when they're laughing, because laughter opens our hearts, and then once a heart is open, you can sort of slip in the message," she said. She cites Mike Birbiglia as a master of the form.

That blend played differently in London than in the States. The song "Mama's a Liar," comedic in its first two sections and genuine in its last, made London audiences visibly uncomfortable. In America, it is the crowd's favorite song.

The path to "Nobody Cares" began with a commission. Audible asked Benanti to write and perform an autobiographical piece, and she said yes immediately — but doubted herself as she wrote. "I just kept thinking, 'Nobody cares. Nobody cares what a middle-aged white lady has to say,'" she said. "But they paid me, so I had to keep writing."

Friends who heard early versions in her garage pushed back on the self-doubt. "They were like, 'I need to hear this, actually,'" she recalled. "What you're saying is something I actually really need and want to hear."

The show has already proved itself in New York and London. Benanti says the audiences are strikingly intergenerational, spanning teenagers to theatergoers in their 80s, laughing at the same material.

Her comic sensibility was not a sudden discovery. She traces it to Twitter, before it became X, where the constraint of the 140-character joke attracted comics to her feed. "In some ways, that helped me more than anything, weirdly," she said. The 2010 musical "Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown," she added, "educated a lot of people in the Broadway community to the fact that I'm a clown. And I always have been."

Her recurring portrayal of Melania Trump on "Late Night With Stephen Colbert" — which she calls one of her proudest roles — widened that recognition further, along with the backlash that came with it. Followers told her to "stick to singing." Her response: "I'm sorry I ever made this a safe space for you. Goodbye."

"If that loses me followers, if that loses me fans, I feel like I'm on the right side of history," she said. "Not everybody's gonna love you, and that's fine."

The Melania impression still surfaces in her theater concerts and on Instagram, though she has no fixed plans for reviving it elsewhere.

Benanti's ambitions for the show are explicit. She describes it as "almost a Trojan horse" — a way to demonstrate her range and, especially in Los Angeles, to get hired for comedy work. "My absolute dream is to be on a television comedy and just get to go to work and laugh all the time," she said.

The show was filmed in London, and she is seeking a distributor. She intends to keep touring it into next year and beyond. "I would like to do this forever," she said.

She also appears in "Mayor of Kingstown," which is returning, and she is, in her words, a free agent. "Anyone who would like to hire me is welcome to hire me."

Tickets for the Wallis run are available at thewallis.org or 310-746-4000; South Coast Repertory tickets are at scr.org. With a filmed version seeking distribution and touring planned into next year, "Nobody Cares" looks less like a detour than a second career.