Belle of the Broadway Ball
From Millburn's Paper Mill Playhouse to the Great White Way, Laura Benanti is having a wonderful ride.
By
Claire M. L. Bourne
Laura Benanti's freshly pressed Cinderella costumes—rags and ball gowns—hang against her dressing-room wall. On the shelf to the left of the chiffon and satin costumes, her pair of golden slippers sparkles in the fluorescent basement light of New York's Broadhurst Theatre. The soft-spoken 23-year-old Kinnelon native says that she always believed Broadway would be the "end-all"—the happily-ever-after of what has become a fairy-tale life. Instead, the Great White Way appears to be the once-upon-a-time beginning for Benanti, who proved her star quality and staying power in a critically acclaimed nine-month run as Cinderella in James Lapine and Stephen Sondheim's 2002 revival of Into the Woods.
 Photograph: Scott Jones |
Sitting with her back to her mirror, Benanti, her chestnut curls tucked neatly under a Polo Sport baseball cap, snacks on an energy bar and loosens up for a Wednesday matinee. Since her 1998 Broadway debut at age eighteen as "the third nun from the left" in The Sound of Music, she has garnered two best- featured-actress Tony Award nominations: the first in 2000 for her work in the musical revue Swing! and the other last spring for her portrayal of a borderline-feminist Cinderella in Into the Woods. None of that would've happened, she says, were it not for the opportunity she had to hone her craft back at Millburn's Paper Mill Playhouse.
When she was fifteen, Benanti received Paper Mill's first Rising Star Award for her performance in the title role in Kinnelon High School's production of Hello, Dolly! She soon secured the role of Mary Rivers in the Paper Mill's staging of Jane Eyre and later played Antonia in The Man of La Mancha, though not before initially passing up the part to graduate from high school and attend her senior prom. "I had a feeling that I wasn't going to get a lot of down time from then on," she says.
She was right. Casting scouts from Broadway's Sound of Music soon came knocking on The Paper Mill's doors in search of a young actress to play Liesl, the von Trapp family's oldest daughter. The Paper Mill's then artistic director Robert Johanson was quick to recommend Benanti for the part. "I knew she had the potential," he says. "She has that star charisma." Benanti was ultimately cast as a member of the chorus and understudy for Maria but assumed the starring role opposite Richard Chamberlain after the original Maria, Rebecca Luker, left the production when her contract expired. While making a name for herself in theater, Benanti has never forgotten her New Jersey roots. Her affection for her home and family is strikingly clear from the photographs of her parents and friends that border her dressing-room mirror. "It's just my home," she says of the state. "I love to be there." She laughs and adds that she has become very well acquainted with NJ Transit, thanks to frequent trips back to Kinnelon.
Her mother, a voice teacher, and stepfather, a psychotherapist, never allowed her to pursue professional acting as a child, and for that she is grateful. She speaks fondly of her conventional childhood—of attending school, taking piano lessons, and participating in school and community theater. "I had a creative and fulfilling life as a child, which I think I draw from as an actor," she says.
Benanti played Cinderella for the first time almost a decade ago at Montville's Barn Theatre in a production directed by Jay Mills. "At the time I brought my fourteen-year-old self to it, which was a much more meek and much more typical Cinderella," she says. So when she heard that Lapine and Sondheim were casting for a revival of their 1987 Broadway hit, she jumped at the chance to audition for the role, viewing it as an opportunity "to play Cinderella again and to do her justice."
As a child, Benanti was angered by the story of Cinderella because she thought that the heroine had no choices. "I think there is a myth that exists, particularly among young girls, that if you are pretty enough, if you don't say too much, if you are sweet and kind to all and you let them walk all over you, then someday someone will recognize that and save your life," she says.
With her golden voice and girl-next-door charm, Benanti has turned Cinderella into what she calls a "well thought-out" woman. "She is perfect," says Johanson, director of Benanti's plays at The Paper Mill, of her Into the Woods performance. "She brings great warmth and honesty to her roles. She truly synthesizes her own self into her acting." Theater critics also took notice of Benanti's performance. The Star-Ledger called her "enchanting" while the Washington Post lauded her "appealing, reflective" portrayal of Cinderella as "the soul of the piece."
Unlike the storybook Cinderella, Lapine and Sondheim's rags-to-riches beauty ditches her prince and discovers inner strength. "Sometimes people leave you/Halfway through the wood./Others may deceive you./You decide what's good," Benanti sings toward the end of the musical, after Cinderella realizes that Prince Charming doesn't represent her destiny.
Playing Cinderella—she left the production last September—allowed her to break the myth surrounding the fairy tale and prove to young girls in the audience that "you can be strong and be healthy and stand up for yourself and people will still like you," she says.
With three Broadway musicals to her credit, Benanti will not hang up her glass slippers anytime soon. In April she'll continue with her primary passion—musical theater—when she plays opposite Antonio Banderas in a revival of the Maury Yeston classic Nine at the Eugene O'Neill Theatre. But she also plans to record an album of original songs before the end of this year. In a business where she speaks other people's words all week, penning her own melodies and lyrics allows her free expression. Songwriting "keeps my brain fueled and keeps me loving what I'm doing," she says.
Benanti is loving her voyage through the enchanted world of Broadway. She pins her last ringlet back, sets aside a burgundy choker for her housemaid-to-princess transformation in this afternoon's performance, and says with confidence, "I don't think that the destination is ever as exciting as the journey."
Claire M. L. Bourne, a former research assistant at New Jersey Monthly, is a junior at Middlebury College in Vermont.