Laura Benanti/Photo: Avery Brunkus
Tony Award-winning actress Laura Benanti brings her one-woman show “Laura Benanti: Nobody Cares” to Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre for five performances only, August 6-9.
A performer of stage and screen, Benanti made her Broadway debut at the age of eighteen as Maria in “The Sound of Music.” Since then, she has starred in ten more Broadway shows and successfully made the transition to film and television, with roles in “Mayor of Kingstown,” “The Gilded Age” and “No Hard Feelings.”
The autobiographical “Nobody Cares” debuted Off-Broadway in 2024 at New York City’s Minetta Lane Theatre in partnership with Audible. The show went on to enjoy a sold-out run at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2025, the largest performing-arts festival in the world. Now, Chicago is the first of seven announced stops on a United States tour, following a recent two-week run in London at Underbelly Soho.
Benanti is a musical theater veteran, but “Nobody Cares” is not a cabaret act or a career retrospective through song. “I wouldn’t call the show stand-up, but it’s the thing it’s most akin to,” says Benanti by phone in July.
She’s shown her comedy chops before, perhaps most recently on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” as a humorous caricature of an aggrieved Melania Trump with a blowout to kill for. Now, she gets to mine humor from her own life. Benanti began writing material during the pandemic, though it wasn’t easy to get started.
“I kept thinking, there’s so much going on in the world; nobody cares what I have to say. It began to morph into other things—all of the things I used to worry about when I was younger. Was I thin enough? Was I pretty enough? Was I popular enough? Was I good enough? But no one was thinking about me, everyone was thinking about themselves. And I wish I had known that when I was younger.”
The realization liberated Benanti from her self-conscious writer’s block and a show was born.
Laura Benanti/Photo: Avery Brunkus
At face value, the phrase “nobody cares” may seem dismissive or flippant, but here it’s the perfect title for a piece born after Benanti reclaimed her creative autonomy.
“It’s not meant to be negative. If anything, it’s meant to be freeing,” agrees Benanti.
But when you’ve lived numerous lives on stage and told others’ stories for more than half your life, how do you learn to tell yours? How do you decide what is sacred and private, and what is shareable for public consumption? And perhaps most importantly, when is it time for an original toe tapper?
“There was one story we [Benanti and song co-writer Todd Almond] were trying to tell, which is my most shameful moment ever. It’s the thing that I feel the most shame about in my whole life, and also it is objectively funny now, given time. It paints me in such a bad light that I was like ‘I think this story has to be told in song, I do not think it’s digestible if I simply speak it.’”
Benanti is a girl’s girl. Witty and thoughtful, she hopes that women feel seen and hear themselves in the stories she tells on stage, stories about pregnancy and motherhood, perimenopause and other topics that aren’t always palatable to society. She believes others will find commonalities in her stories, regardless of age or gender.
“There’s such a wide variety of people in the audience—teenagers, women in their twenties, mothers, women my age, grandmothers. I find the intergenerational aspect of the audience really satisfying. And my beloved gay men, my favorite kind of men. And of course, the boyfriends and husbands who were dragged there,” she laughs.
As the show embarks on the road, Benanti is excited and grateful.
“To watch everybody get on board the train and laugh at the same things… It’s just been really gratifying to be like, wow, I wrote this thinking nobody cares, but actually a lot of very different people do and that feels really nice.”
“Laura Benanti: Nobody Cares” at Steppenwolf Theatre, 1650 North Halsted, August 6-9. Tickets and more here.
