Song-and-dance gals tackle roles off the musical path

The first thing she says is "Shut up!" Then the gorgeous, dark-haired woman in the scary corset and the thigh-high leather boots snaps a riding crop at her new customer and commands him to lick her spiky footwear.

The punch line - and it's so good I hate to spoil it - comes when the guy, hanging from the dungeon ceiling in handcuffs, looks at her and says, "I'm sorry, did you go to Stuyvesant?"

And at that very moment, no kidding, I'm sitting in the audience at Second Stage Theatre's production of Paul Weitz's "Trust" and I'm thinking, "I'm sorry, aren't you Princess Fiona from 'Shrek the Musical'?"

Sure enough. In a dazzling transformation, Sutton Foster - Tony-winning mistress of blissfully goofy musical-comedy heroines - is appearing Off-Broadway in her first nonmusical, playing way off-type as both a tough sex professional and a complex, melancholy woman with a damaged past.

It is an especially deft un-star turn, one that made me think about the equally unexpected morphing of Laura Benanti last summer in Christopher Durang's "Why Torture Is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them" at the Public Theater. There was the romantic-musical beauty - indelible from her Tony-winning portrayal of Louise, the shy daughter who grows up into a famously elegant stripper in "Gypsy" - in one of Durang's profoundly loopy satires.

For her first nonsinging role in New York, Benanti chose to play Felicity, a cartoon of a good girl who wakes up in a hotel room married to an ominous, unemployed opportunist - and possible terrorist - she met while drunk at Hooter's.

She must have enjoyed being in a nonmusical - what, for lack of a better term, is called a straight play. Months later, there she was on Broadway in Sarah Ruhl's "In the Next Room or the Vibrator Play," being subtle and funny as the bright but infantilized wife of a Victorian doctor who treats unhappy women with the newest labor-saving device, the electric vibrator.

What, you may be asking right now, is the big deal? Actors are actors, right, and talent is talent, and the theater understood multitasking centuries before we had a word for it.

And, yet, there is a thrill in watching big musical stars turn away, temporarily, from the stylized power of singing and dancing. Audra McDonald, with her two Tonys for musicals, did it twice - "Master Class" and "A Raisin in the Sun." She won Tonys for both.

But of all the musical actresses of our time (and much of the past), Patti LuPone is the one who has led the way for others to stray outside the diva-dimension into drama. LuPone was classically trained for repertory theater in John Houseman's drama department at Juilliard. She toured America for four years (in a bus) with his first Acting Company - in Chekhov's "Three Sisters" one night, the title role in Christopher Marlowe's "Edward the Second" the next.

Though she is famous for her huge Tony winners - "Evita" and "Gypsy" - I cherish her performances in six David Mamet plays, especially her quiet portrayal of the sister in "The Old Neighborhood" on Broadway in 1997. Whenever I resent Mamet for writing shallow women characters, I have to make exceptions for the ones LuPone portrayed.

Musicals offer more and better roles than plays for women, especially mid-career women, particularly in New York. And plays, frankly, pay less and offer less glitter.

LuPone and Benanti are together again, rehearsing for the Lincoln Center Theater's new musical adaptation of Pedro Almodóvar's 1988 movie, "Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown." Benanti plays a fashion model whose lover turns out to be a terrorist - thank you, Christopher Durang. Come spring, Foster will star in "Anything Goes," the first revival of the Cole Porter musical comedy since LuPone had her long-running smash at Lincoln Center in 1987.

Foster and Benanti have another musical legend in common. Both made their attention-getting Broadway debuts as women identified worldwide with Julie Andrews in the movies. Benanti, fresh out of high school, understudied Rebecca Luker, then succeeded her, in the 1997 revival of "The Sound of Music." By 1999, she was in "Swing!," a glorified nightclub show best remembered for her irresistible musical conversation with a trombone in "Cry Me a River." Four years later, she graduated to one of Antonio Banderas' muses in "Nine," then fully blossomed in "Gypsy."

Foster burst onto Broadway in 2002 in "Thoroughly Modern Millie," based on Andrews' 1967 movie hit. Not even finished with high school (her diploma came later from correspondence school), she paid dues in bit parts and road companies. Suddenly, she was the understudy who stepped into the title role a week before the out-of-town previews of "Millie" and ignited all the old star-is-born cliches. She took the stage - and the best actress Tony - with her uninhibited, what-the-heck comfort level and the discipline to go with her instincts.

Foster played another Jazz Age star in "The Drowsy Chaperone" in 2006, tossing off cartwheels as she changed gowns six times while memorably protesting that she was tired of showing off. A year later, she brought her endearing gawky-soubrette lyricism (and a yodel) to Inga, the nubile assistant in "Young Frankenstein." Another year later, she was wonderfully tap dancing with mice as Shrek's lovely and ridiculous Princess Fiona.

So you can, perhaps, imagine the surprise at seeing her expertise with a genuine bullwhip in "Trust," which runs through Sept.12. Asked this week about her journey away from musicals, she explains, "After I finished my run with 'Shrek the Musical,' I was really looking for projects that excited me. When I read 'Trust,' the idea of delving into a world that I was so unfamiliar with and frankly so uncomfortable with excited me very much." She also liked being in a contemporary play with four actors - nothing with "huge sets and hoopla."

"There are obvious differences between plays and musicals," she adds, "But they really are the same. We are all just telling stories, creating characters, going on journeys. Just sometimes the characters break into song or dance in a musical as a way of expressing themselves.

"It's nice to have a break from that and just talk." It's nice for us, too.