Summer silliness abounds on Broadway at the Hudson, where Merrily We Roll Along has rolled out after its Tony-winning run and Once Upon a Mattress has rolled right in. The original production in 1959 made a star of Carol Burnett, a tough act to follow–a musical version of “The Princess and the Pea” that is otherwise middling-to-good is confined with bedsores without a royally funny presence as its center. Enter Sutton Foster.
I’ve seen just about everything Foster has done in her stage career but she’s full knockabout clown here, part Shrek, part Beetlejuice, and 100 percent herself as a comic, singer, and dancer. There’s a lot of buildup to the entrance of her character, the lovably unprincessy Princess Winnifred (“Fred”), and if the performer doesn’t deliver, there’s no show. (Sarah Jessica Parker, a different kind of actress, starred in the prior Broadway revival, in 1996. There was no show.) Paired with the always delightful Michael Urie as her would-be prince, and with a tip-top supporting cast to boot, Foster gets as much magic out of the venerable property as it allows.
With music by Mary Rodgers (daughter of Richard, and later the author of Freaky Friday) and family-friendly, let’s-put-on-a-show type book and lyrics Once Upon a Mattress is a perennial at high schools and community theaters, but its featherweight quality makes it something of a challenge to mount more substantively. Director LearDeBessonet had a hit with the Encores! revival of Stephen Sondheim’s more erudite fairy tale vision Into the Woods and for the popular concert series she again pares away the presentation, with David Zinn’s simple, elegant scenic design, effective lighting (by Justin Townsend), and little bursts of enchantment from Brooks Ashmanskas’ Wizard creating the environment and a delightful overture setting the mood. What she’s added is that firing-on-all-cylinders cast and a book that’s gotten a pleasing glow up from Marvelous Mrs. Maisel creator Amy Sherman-Palladino.
Once the Jester (Daniel Breaker, Shrek the Musical‘s Donkey) explains in song that the story we think we know from Hans Christian Andersen isn’t exactly the story we’re about to see we enter the long-ago far-away medieval kingdom of this fractured fairy tale. Queen Aggravain (Ana Gasteyer, with permantently arched eyebrows) and King Sextimus the Silent (David Patrick Kelly), who has been rendered mute by a witch’s curse, audition princess after princess for the hand of their son Dauntless (Urie, most recently seen in ancient garb in the less successful revival of Monty Python’s Spamalot). Sextimus may be silent but everyone including the mother-dominated Dauntless is cowed by Aggravain, who refuses to let anyone in the kingdom marry until she finds exactly the right candidate. This proves impossible given her many tests, which is a problem for the show’s second banana couple, the lovely (and pregnant) Lady Larken (Nikki Renée Daniels, from the Company revival) and dashing, if clueless, knight of the realm Sir Harry (Will Chase). Relief seems to be at hand with the arrival of the swamp-dwelling whiralgig Fred, who flummoxes, then delights, Dauntless and the court with her uninhibited antics–all except the scheming Aggravain, who plans a bedtime sensitivity test involving twenty mattresses and the infamous pea, which Fred will surely flunk.
There’s not much story to Once Upon a Mattress, which strains to make it into two acts. But there’s plenty of shtick, which Foster seizes right from Fred’s famed opening number (and the show’s enduring standard, which supplies the title of the fine Rodgers biography), “Shy.” The joke is that Fred is anything but demure and Foster’s energetic pratfalling propels the show, whether she’s stuffing grapes and other food into her mouth or dancing up a storm (Lorin Latarro choreographs). In this she harmonizes with Urie, another performer I never tire of, with his jokey asides and twinkle. They make sweet music with an uneven but pleasant score, and almost make a second-tier show look like a first-rate one. That takes real stage magic and they’re not alone, with Daniels and Chase in particular giving what could be stock stuff all they’ve got. At 65 this show is now a senior citizen, and in less capable hands would show its age, but this spirited revival gives Mattress renewed…spring.
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