Once Upon a Mattress, the delightful fairy-tale musical, has always been a thin affair. Basically a revue sketch stretched to a full evening, its success has depended on the talents of its leading lady and director. The book by Jay Thompson, Marshall Barer and Dean Fuller takes the story of “The Princess and the Pea,” gives it a slightly adult spin, and adds tangential material for supporting players. The songs by Mary Rodgers and Barer are catchy and sweet, some in the character-building manner of Rodgers’s fabled father Richard. If you have the right cast and director, it can be a pleasant, joyful time. The original 1959 production provided a launching pad for the phenomenal career of Carol Burnett and her persona as an overly enthusiastic, man-hungry, gawky but lovable clown. There were three successful TV adaptations (two with Burnett as the lead and one with her as the nasty Queen), but two major NYC revivals failed to soar because Sarah Jessica Parker (1996) and Jackie Hoffman (2015) were not the right fit.
The new streamlined staging by Lear deBessonet with script revisions by Amy Sherman-Palladino at the Hudson after an Encores! run, benefits from the presence of the sublime Sutton Foster who here proves she can do just about any musical comedy role in the modern canon. Having previously taken on the suppressed librarian Marian in The Music Man and the brassy showgirl-evangelist Reno Sweeney in Anything Goes and made them her own despite memories of Barbara Cooke and Ethel Merman, Sutton does the same for Princess Winnifred the Woebegone. She pays tribute to Burnett’s knock-about style but adds touches of her own with hilariously inventive business from deBessonet who also found new life in another fairy-tale show Into the Woods.
Take Winnifred’s first entrance. This is an important part of the show as it introduces the star and establishes her character. Foster crawls over the castle wall (behind which the orchestra is seated on a raised platform) and emerges bedraggled and disheveled in Andrea Hood’s cleverly cluttered costume, having just swam the moat. She then proceeds to pull leeches, swamp flora, and various live critters from her bare shoulders, hair and dress, flinging some into the audience. She does all these actions while kidding herself and fawning over the kingdom’s elite, trying to make a good impression. She moves like a wrestler or an acrobat, ready to pounce or embrace in her eagerness to please. She lets us know a ton about Winnifred’s character and objectives while wringing belly laughs out of deBessonet’s staging. That’s not to mention what she does later in the show with a bowl of grapes or the infamous mile-high mountain of mattresses. She also puts across Winifred’s torch number, “Happily Ever After” and her novelty spot “The Swamps of Home” like an expert batter scoring two home runs. Sutton is sublime.
Her so-star Michael Urie is almost as inventive and expressive as the arrested-development adolescent Prince Dauntless, the object of Winnifred’s martial quest. He makes the Prince’s cluelessness about the birds and the bees into a driving force for the character’s objective: discovering the truth about sex. This makes the riotously funny “Man to Man Talk” duet with his mute father, the king (marvelous mime David Patrick Kelly) into a breakthrough moment. He also has a physical bit defining Dauntless’ struggles. He makes mounting a series of steep stairs into a battle to prove his burgeoning manhood. When he finally ascends without a misstep, the audience bursts into applause.
Dauntless’s domineering mother, the overbearing Queen Aggravain, is made into a comic bulldozer of maternal suffocation by the hilariously bullying Ana Gasteyer. deBessonet gives further subtext and detail to the Queen by transforming the “Sensitivity” comedy number into a beauty spa treatment for the obsequious wizard (magnificent Brooks Ashmanskas) to apply to her demanding Majesty. Ashmanskas gives Gasteyer a massage, a foot run, offers a pep pill, and paints her nails all while important information is dispensed. In Sherman-Palladino’s tightened new book, the role of the narrating Minstrel is folded into the Jester, played with a deft touch by Daniel Breaker who gets to lead the talented chorus in “Very Soft Shoes,” choreographer Lorin Latarro’s sparkling tribute to Bob Fosse’s “I Wanna Be a Dancing Man.” Latarro also supplies appropriately goofy, off-kilter steps for the frantic “Spanish Panic” and additional zany numbers.
Will Chase and Nikki Renee Daniels give the secondary pair of lovers, Sir Harry and Lady Larkin the right sharp satiric edges to prevent them from becoming gooey stereotypes. Their two duets “In a Little While” and “Yesterday I Loved You” are impressively and sweetly sung.
In additional to all these splendid elements, David Zinn’s cartoonish sets, Hood’s wacky costumes, Bruce Coughlin’s rich orchestrations, and Mary-Mitchell Campbell’s expert music supervision make this the downiest and comfiest Mattress an audience ever rested their weary, laughing heads on.
