“I’m a little nervous about doing an autobiographical one-woman show,” Laura Benanti said Friday as she took the stage at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre. “Because, first of all, gross.”
Well, not at all. But the setup was indicative of a slyly self-protective undertone in a strikingly funny show from Benanti and director Annie Tippe that looks to further shift her persona away from being a Broadway star with a specialty in Golden Age musicals to a feminist stand-up survivor ready and able to mine her three marriages (two, she tells us, to a “man-boy”) for seemingly (if not actually) self-deprecating material.
Don’t be fooled by the title, “Nobody Cares.” Benanti very much wants her audience to care, but she also wants to take control of her own narrative at this juncture in her career. Her show is laser-focused on Gen-X women, a demographic that mostly filled the Steppenwolf seats. So much so, in fact, that Benanti said she wanted to apologize to her gay fans “for talking so much about my vagina.”
If you were expecting musical selections from “The Sound of Music,” “Cinderella” or “Gypsy,” you’ll be disappointed; Benanti does not look back with fondness or nostalgia on her career as an ingenue, casting herself as a recovered “people pleaser” who failed to stand up for herself as a young woman encountering questionable Broadway men, including two husbands and a nameless “powerful” producer who propositioned her 19-year-old self. Indeed, her show, tellingly, has no Broadway selections whatsoever, excepting a few satirical measures from “Send in the Clowns.” Along with Benanti’s patter, you get original, witty parody songs (co-written with Todd Almond) covering topics like childbirth, motherhood and peri-menopause.
Benanti’s brutal impression of Melania Trump on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” attracted much attention, and that’s the vibe here, albeit with the aforementioned autobiographical slant. Despite the three musicians on stage, “Nobody Cares” really is a stand-up set, and a caustic, sharp-elbowed one at that.
With language like “recovery journey” front and center, at times it feels like “Nobody Cares” is a post-therapy manifesto (not that there is anything wrong with that), and, of course, you are only getting one point of view on her three marriages (not that there is anything wrong with that). But there are plenty of affirmative laughs in her roughly 65-minute set, tickets to which are not cheap.
“How many of you have slept with someone because you didn’t want to hurt their feelings?” she asked at one point, an amusingly challenging bit of audience participation that caused quite the ripple and a few hands going up and down and then halfway up again. Some of the men in the room could be seen glancing nervously at their dates.
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No encore; this version of Benanti was not about to come out and sing, “Some day, my prince will come.”
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic
If you go
“Nobody Cares” plays through Sunday at Steppenwolf Theatre, 1650 N. Halsted St.; 312-335-1650 and www.steppenwolf.org