Laura Benanti Sings with Her Daughter, When She’s Not Impersonating Melania Trump

NEW YORK — On a frosty February morning, Laura Benanti, a celebrated cabaret performer and Broadway star, sat in a Harlem church basement and worked through a few songs: “The Hello Song,” “Trot, Old Joe,” “Splishing and Splashing,” “Snowflakes.”

This isn’t Benanti’s usual set list. But it was her regular duet partner: Ella, her 11-month-old daughter, seated in her lap. Every Thursday, mother and daughter stroll a couple of blocks north from their Harlem apartment and scoot into a circle of brightly colored yoga mats for their weekly class with Music Together, a community program where children and parents gather to create music.

Benanti, a fizzy, dizzy and witty actress who recently wrapped the Broadway comedy “Meteor Shower” and plays a fanatical mail fraud investigator on the TV comedy “The Detour,” had spent the previous evening on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,” on which she has a standing gig as Melania Trump. When Benanti narrows her eyes and pouts her lips, the resemblance to the first lady is jarring.

In the sketch, Melania was promoting a new fragrance, Ocean of Loneliness, “a decadent bouquet of gardenia blossoms with a hint of ‘I live in a prison of my own making.'” Benanti had thought it would be funny to spray some in her mouth, before realizing that the props department had supplied her with actual cologne.

“I thought I was going to die afterwards,” Benanti said. But she had recovered enough to trill “Alabama Gal.”

Ella, in a gray dress and gray tights with hearts at the knees, was a chubby-cheeked dynamo. Fresh from a morning nap, she raced around the room, sometimes toddling toward the bathroom and lunging for the elevator. Benanti stopped her just before she gnawed a pair of shoes left near the entrance: “I don’t mean to be a helicopter parent, but. …”

When Ella allowed it, Benanti sat with the singer Kate Mangiameli. The two women met by chance in a Starbucks last year, bonding over their colicky babies. The Music Together ringers occasionally joke about adding some vibrato to the “Hello Song,” but so far they’ve resisted the urge to showboat.

The room was low-ceilinged and bright, with about a dozen mothers and their babies. The Music Together teacher passed out drums, and Benanti watched as Ella tried to stand on top of one and then wielded another like a tennis racket before giving it a couple of smacks.

“Yes,” Benanti said. “Solo!”

Then Ella ran off with a drumstick. “Oh good,” Benanti said with a sigh, getting up again. “She can poke her eye out with that.”

When the hourlong class ended and the instruments and jingle bells and rainbow-colored parachute were tidied away, Benanti and Ella reunited with Ella’s nanny, Johana Caballero, who helped Ella into her stroller. “Johana saves me every day,” Benanti said as the elevator took them to street level. “I would never want to purport that I do this myself.”

Her put-together appearance is another thing she didn’t want to purport. She had had her hair done that morning and had taken an extra moment to wipe Ella’s breakfast off her black pants. “Normally I look like a monster,” she said. “Like a garbage monster.”

Benanti, the daughter of the former Broadway performer and voice teacher Linda Benanti, spent the first half of her pregnancy starring in the blissful Broadway musical “She Loves Me” and suffering from morning sickness. She would throw up in the wings and run onto the stage. “It was so brutal,” she said. Then postpartum depression kicked in, so early motherhood has not been only raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens.

“But don’t get me wrong,” Benanti said. “I love Ella in a way I never thought possible.”

Benanti steered the stroller toward a coffee shop near Morningside Park, where they share breakfast every morning. Benanti is incognito in the neighborhood, but not Ella. “She’s famous,” Benanti said. “In this four-block radius, she is famous.” And as soon as the stroller nudged through the door, the baristas began to fuss over her.

“Ella, you’re back for Round 2,” one said.

“Ella, your birthday is coming,” the other said.

A line cook made funny faces while a fussing Ella waited for Benanti’s tuna toast and Caballero’s latte. “You’re calming her down,” Benanti told him. “Do you want to live with us?”

The coffee shop was crowded and Ella’s mood was dicey, so when the food and drinks were ready, Benanti strolled her home, improvising a song on the way: “You are so mad. You hate this stroller. I know. I know.”

They took another elevator up to the sunny apartment — yellow rug, gleaming countertops — and Benanti stripped off their layers while Caballero readied Ella’s brown rice pasta and veggie purée. (Ella would ignore it in favor of her mom’s sandwich.) The living room was filled with brightly colored furniture and baskets of toys and a piano that Ella occasionally thumped.

Her diaper changed, Ella went into diva mode, wailing and clutching at her mother’s discarded fur coat. “Are you having your Liza Minnelli time?” her mother said. “Are you crying and holding your fur?”

Unlike the real Minnelli, Benanti is a lyric soprano and so is her mother. The two of them have a cabaret act, “Linda and Laura Benanti: The Story Goes On.” Will Ella ever join them? Will she have the range? “I think she’s going to be a belter,” Benanti said.

Ella obliged with a throaty yowl.