Picture: Avery Brunkus
Laura Benanti: Nobody Cares at the Underbelly Boulevard Soho, London.
Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩
Following an acclaimed sold-out run at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Tony Award winner Laura Benanti brings her one-woman show Nobody Cares to Soho’s Underbelly Boulevard. A blend of cabaret, stand-up and confessional, Benanti pairs her Broadway polish with a disarming willingness to let the mask slip.
The actress and singer is at her most comfortable in the quick asides: the one-liners, the deadpan punchlines, the knowing winks that feel as if she’s breaking the fourth wall of a sitcom. But while the jokes are consistently sharp, it’s the storytelling that gives the evening weight.
Benanti recounts the messier moments of her life: an early career encounter with a predatory producer, a pattern of saying ‘yes’ in the personal and professional, and two failed marriages. These tales feel lived-in, unvarnished and told with comedic frankness that makes them all the more compelling.
The music, co-written with long-time collaborator Todd Almond and performed with a three-piece band, works well to guide the audience through the storytelling and provide moments of comic relief. Almond and Benanti have a wonderful rapport, which you’d expect after 20-plus years of friendship. It’s a rare thrill to hear a voice of her calibre – honed on Broadway’s biggest stages – up close in such an intimate room, where its power and nuance feel astonishing.
Not all of Nobody Cares feels familiar to a general audience – few can relate to being cast on Broadway at 18 (in The Sound of Music). Yet there is a universality to her observations about not feeling you can say no to the point of injury (emotionally and in her case during her stage career even physically) that makes the material resonate.
Perhaps most impressively, Nobody Cares captures the shifting stages of womanhood. The show speaks in turn to young ‘ingenues’ finding their footing, new mums left to fend for themselves, and to those navigating perimenopause, ‘the amuse bouche of menopause’ that no one warns you about. While at times the breadth feels over ambitious, it also underscores the unifying truth at its core: that being a woman is complex, exhausting and often painful, but also filled with hope, solidarity and humour.
Benanti is a magnetic presence, effortlessly blending wit with vulnerability. If anything, the show feels like it barely scratches the surface of her extraordinary life and career. Nobody Cares is entertaining, illuminating and often very funny, but it also leaves you wishing for more. A memoir next?
Elisha Owen
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