Night after night (and two afternoons a week), Laura Benanti’s makeup assistant spends quite some time masking the butterfly the actress has tattooed on her lower back so it won’t show in “Let Me Entertain You,” the eye-riveting number in which Ms. Benanti, as the gawky Louise in “Gypsy,” molts into the stripper Gypsy Rose Lee.
It’s even harder, she said, to tap into emotions naked enough to become Louise, the neglected, dreamy, second-fiddle daughter who astounds herself and her pathologically pushy mother, Momma Rose, by discovering a talent for seductive, racy celebrity. The production, directed by Arthur Laurents, who wrote the show’s book, and with Patti LuPone giving her considerable all as Rose, opens at the St. James Theater on Thursday. Boyd Gaines plays Herbie, Rose’s strung-along gentleman friend, in the story inspired by Lee’s memoirs. “For this,” Ms. Benanti said, “I tap into a loneliness I felt as a kid.”
Ms. Benanti, 28 — a stripper now, a sultry movie star with Antonio Banderas in “Nine,” a slinky singer in “Swing!” — “was a bit of an ugly duckling growing up,” she said. “Also, when I got to be about 11 ½, the other girls didn’t want to play dress up and pretend anymore. I started to keep that other part to myself. There was a lot of singing show tunes into the mirror in my room.” School and community theater in Kinnelon, N.J., paved a swan’s way out.
Mr. Laurents appreciates Ms. Benanti’s emotional availability. “I don’t know how hard it is on her,” he said. “Only she can answer that. But we enjoy working together. And that voice. Her emotions are very close to the surface. She’s emotionally honest. She’s not interested in effects.”
That quality, he said, is exactly right for the 1959 musical in 2008. “This production is unlike any other,” he said.
The staging, based on the Encores! Summer Stars version he directed last year with the same leads at City Center, “is more a play with music,” he said. “It’s totally about character.”
But there’s not a sign of the real Gypsy Rose Lee in Ms. Benanti’s dressing room. “I read her book and watched a few of her clips,” she said, “but no movies, and I’d never seen a ‘Gypsy’ production. I didn’t want to do a caricature of her. I tried to take only her sense of humor, and honesty.” And her genius with elbow-length gloves.
Far more seminal, she said, was reading “Original Story By,” the memoir by Mr. Laurents, 89. “It did make me feel like I’d been born into the wrong time,” she said. “There’s just something incredibly beautiful in musical theater about the idea that when you can no longer express yourself in words, you can sing it or dance it.”
“Gypsy” has sung and danced its way to a standing as one of the great American musicals. Ms. Benanti shares that assessment, but she said it is significant as well for its role as “a gay icon, particularly for a generation of men who couldn’t be open and watched their sisters do what they wanted to and couldn’t” — much as Rose ultimately envies her daughters.
“One of the most wonderful people I ever knew was my Uncle Bob,” Ms. Benanti said, “who lived in Washington, D.C., and never got to express his love of this art. He was in the Gay Men’s Chorus there, and I sang with them two years before he died. I think of him sometimes when I watch Patti in ‘Rose’s Turn.’ ”
Ms. Benanti’s mother, she rushed to say, “is the exact opposite of Rose” and wouldn’t let her audition for professional theater until she was in her late teens. Though her parents — Linda Wonneberger Benanti, a former actress who became her daughter’s voice teacher, and the actor Martin Vidnovic — divorced when Ms. Benanti was young, she remains close to both. Her mother’s second husband, Sal Benanti, is a psychotherapist, and she chose to take his last name.
“He taught me to embrace myself for who I am,” she said, “and to cultivate my being a very emotional person toward a positive place. He also taught me concern and empathy for people beyond myself rather than giving in to the narcissism that comes with being an actor.”
Ms. LuPone, she said, is another guide. “Ultimate commitment is what she has taught me,” Ms. Benanti said, “and that there’s no such thing as overanalyzing.”
Ms. Benanti caused her first Broadway sensation when she was only 19 — as a nun. As Rebecca Luker’s understudy Maria in “The Sound of Music,” she was such a hit during Ms. Luker’s vacation that she won the part once the star left the show.
She was tripped up, however, by a glass slipper. One of her pratfalls as Cinderella in the 2002 Broadway production of “Into the Woods” fractured her neck, an excruciating and at times partially paralyzing condition that went misdiagnosed for nine months. Forced to miss many performances yet constrained from speaking about the cause, Ms. Benanti said she was criticized as “a drama queen and a faker.”
She underwent an operation for her injury that could have damaged her voice. It was a success. In “Nine,” the show she did almost immediately afterward, she wore a wide choker to hide the scar on her throat.
Only in the last year has another scar faded, from the dissolution of her marriage to Chris Barron, lead singer of the Spin Doctors. In September, between her two productions of “Gypsy,” she married the actor Steve Pasquale.
“I can walk, and I can sing, and I am healthy for the first time in a long time,” she said. “People sometimes draw analogies between ‘Gypsy’ being about vaudeville dying and interest in theater now being in decline. But that puts a negative spin on the framework I’m in. I don’t think theater is dying, and musicals are a great American art form. We’ve got apple pie, jazz and musical theater. I want to do this my whole lif
