Review: LAURA BENANTI: NOBODY CARES at The Huntington

From multiple marriages and a neck broken mid-performance to the downsides of aging, nothing was off limits in “Laura Benanti: Nobody Cares,” the one-person comedy show that Tony Award winner Benanti brought to Boston’s Calderwood Pavilion at the Boston Center for the Arts recently as part of The Huntington’s Select Series.

The versatile performer’s comic styling was on full display throughout the self-created show, originally commissioned and produced by Audible Theater, which premiered Off-Broadway in 2024 at the Minetta Lane Theatre. In 2025, Benanti performed the show – with songwriting partner and music director Todd Almond – at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

While she divorced her first husband, Spin Doctors lead singer Chris Barron, and her second one, actor and singer Steven Pasquale, Benanti has been married to third husband Patrick Brown for almost 11 years. The couple have two daughters, Ella and Louisa, who provide their share of comic fodder. Benanti credits four-year-old Louisa’s candor – exclaiming, “Mommy, nobody cares,” while the actor and singer was telling stories from her career – for inspiring her current show.

What young Louisa might have realized had she been at one of her mother’s five sold-out Boston shows, however, is that, whether laughing or singing along, audiences care a great deal about the New York City-born performer, who made her Broadway debut as an ensemble member and later as Maria Von Trapp in the 1998 revival of “The Sound of Music.”

Of that production, in which Michael Siberry was replaced as Captain Von Trapp by Richard Chamberlain, Benanti recalled, “Here I was, a teenager fresh out of high school and I’m starring on Broadway as Maria opposite a 70-year-old gay man. It was perfect casting.”

Benanti’s sharp, self-deprecating wit was turned up high throughout the show, which, under the fast-paced direction of Annie Tippe, opened in flashy, classic Vegas style, showcasing Benanti – in a blush pink satin pantsuit and a sheer navy evening blouse – as she sang, danced, and moved with a sexiness reminiscent of onetime nightclub headliner Joey Heatherton. Her abundant charm clearly connected with the audience, who showed no qualms about leaning in like old friends and enjoying the star’s sometimes bawdy stories.

Her life as a working stage and screen actor and singer, as well as a two-time divorcée and perimenopausal suburban mom, gives her a lot to work with but, in a short show that also includes original songs, it leaves little time for Broadway anecdotes from her many shows. which include revivals of “Into the Woods” (2002), “Nine” (2003), “Gypsy” (2008) – for which she won her Tony as Best Featured Actress in a Musical as vaudevillian Louise Hovick turned ecdysiast Gypsy Rose Lee – “She Loves Me” (2016), and “My Fair Lady” (2018), and the original productions of “Swing!” (2000), "The Wedding Singer" (2006), “In the Next Room (or the Vibrator Play)” (2009), and “Meteor Shower” (2017).

For Benanti, currently playing Cindy on the Paramount+ series “Mayor of Kingstown,” which stars Jeremy Renner, and seen in feature films including “Worth,” “No Hard Feelings,” and “Goodrich,” it also meant leaving behind her Melania Trump impression, which she did to wide acclaim for a decade on CBS-TV’s now canceled “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.”

That didn’t seem to bother her many enthusiastic local fans one bit, though. For them, the First Lady at The Huntington was Benanti herself.

Photo caption: At top, Tony Award winner Laura Benanti (“Gypsy”) and music director Todd Almond concluded a five-show run of “Laura Benanti: Nobody Cares” at The Huntington’s Calderwood Pavilion, Boston Center for the Arts, on October 25. Photo by Pamela Raith.