BWW Reviews: Lovely Laura Benanti Is A Dazzling 'Idiot's' Delight in Her New Show at 54 Below

Cabaret Reviews and Commentary by Stephen Hanks

Halfway through her Monday opening night at 54 Below, Laura Benanti unveiled the evening's showstopper, a multi pop-song mix titled "Inappropriate Medley." No, Benanti didn't faux strip her way through the songs as if she was replaying her past role as Gypsy Rose Lee, but she frantically ripped through eight songs, including Beyonce's "All the Single Ladies," "Old Man River," Sonny & Cher's "I Got You Babe," Aretha Franklin's "Respect," and culminated the riff by boogying like Tina Turner on "Proud Mary," while playing a tambourine tossed over by her Musical Director/Pianist Todd Almond. As the audience commenced with raucous cheering, an almost out-of-breath Benanti quipped, "I can't wait to read the review tomorrow that says Laura Benanti is an idiot."

Well, Laura Benanti may be a lot of things, but idiot is not one of them. Brunette beautiful, uber-talented, funny, charming, and down-to-earth would be among the more appropriate adjectives one might use to describe her during In Constant Search of the Right Kind of Attention, probably the most misnamed cabaret show ever. Not only because it was hard to discern such a theme based on the set list, but because if this woman isn't getting the right attention something is seriously wrong. Perhaps if her two recent TV shows, The Playboy Club and Go On, hadn't been cancelled, Laura Benanti would be getting the attention she rightly deserves. As it is, she should start getting some serious consideration as one of the New York cabaret scene's most divine divas.

The last time I saw Benanti do a cabaret set was at the late Feinstein's at Loews Regency on the May 1, 2011 night Osama Bin Laden was killed. After observing her latest star turn, I wondered if lightning might strike twice and find out that someone equally evil had gone down--perhaps the president of Syria, that shameless NRA shill for the gun lobby, or any of the extreme nut jobs from the Tea Party Republicans in Congress. But no such luck. I had to settle for just another killer Benanti show.

Benanti is not a belter, a fact she is not shy about pointing out when she jokes, "Some day I can imagine somebody saying, 'Once upon a time there was this thing called head voice.'" Instead, she possess that wonderful combination of musical theater soprano and contemporary pop vocal, the former displayed in her nightingale-like opening "I'm Old Fashioned" (during which her cheeky sense of humor was evident when she broke out a cell phone and faked taking pictures of the audience), and the latter on a marvelous mash-up of two recent pop hits, Ellie Goulding's 2010 song "Starry-Eyed" and Lana Del Rey's 2012 "Video Games." One couldn't help being starry-eyed listening to Benanti's ethereal sounds pierce the air on a solid arrangement buoyed with great band support from Almond, Ann Klein on guitar, Brain Ellingsen on bass, and Rich Mercurio on drums. She also paid homage to the classic Broadway musicals she loves with a tender version of Frank Loesser's "My Time of Day," from Guys and Dolls, and a bouncy arrangement of Lerner & Loewe's "On the Street Where You Live" from My Fair Lady.

But Benanti is basically a glamorous good-time girl who doesn't let the seriousness linger too long. "When I was nine, I knew the entire score of Follies!," she admitted early in the show. "I was a 45-year-old gay man in a little girl's body." One running gag was her offering "unknown facts about Studio 54," the iconic and decadent disco of the 1970s that may have left archaeological finds on the site where the current club stands. "Everything in this room," she insisted with a straight face, "is made of cocaine." Later she revealed, "In that corner, Liza Minnelli gave birth to a baby entirely made of glitter." Since Liza was already second generation glitterati, that could have happened. (Please click on Page 2 below to continue.)

In her Feinstein's show, Benanti had revealed that after seeing Marilyn Monroe play a ukulele in the film Some Like It Hot, she always wanted to strum the instrument, so out it came for an adorable Betty Boop-ish medley of "I Want to Be Loved By You" and The Beatles' "Honey Pie." For this show, she performed her own very cute "Ukulele Song," and if you didn't want to storm the stage and pinch her cheeks (all four of them), you weren't paying attention. Benanti brought her mini-concert home with two wonderful interpretations that have become standards of her shows, Harry Chapin's poignant story song "Mr. Tanner" (about a novice singer from the sticks whose New York debut is panned in the press) and Maury Yeston's passionate ballad "Unusual Way," from Nine, the musical in which Benanti played Claudia for the 2003 revival.

But if she was still hoping for the right kind of attention, Benanti definitely got it on her encore, David Yazbek's "Model Behavior," from Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. Her tour de force performance of this number as the character Candela in the short-lived 2011 production earned Benanti a Tony nomination and a Drama Desk Award. "If you didn't see that show, this is going to be tedious," Benanti said self-deprecatingly before launching into the frenetic song that is a one-sided phone call between girl friends. She needn't have worried. Nothing Laura Benanti does on a stage is tedious . . . or idiotic.

Laura Benanti's current run at 54 Below continues with shows on May 22 at 7pm, May 23 at 7pm and 9:30pm, May 24 at 8:30pm, and May 25 at 8:30pm and 11pm.

To post a comment, you must register and login.