If it’s 2,000 beaming faces aglow with musical comedy pleasure you’re looking for, head over to City Center this week or next to catch Once Upon a Mattress. Several minutes and three songs in, a pair of bright young lovers launch into a gently upbeat ballad duet called “In a Little While,” and all’s right in the world—or at least for the two hours you’re at Encores’ latest.
We have already, by this point, gotten a strong promise of comedy tonight from the entrance antics of Michael Urie (as the dauntless Prince Dauntless) and Harriet Harris (as his aggravatingly vain mother, Queen Aggrivain). Then comes that love song from the dashingly chivalrous but not-so-bright Sir Harry (Cheyenne Jackson) and the lovely but slightly pregnant Lady Larken (Nikki Renée Daniels). The audience is primed and pumped for a star entrance when up out of the moat climbs Sutton Foster as the Amazonian (or is it Tarzanian?) princess from the swamps of home, Winnifred the Woebegone. “Call me by my nickname,” she says. “Winnie?” asks Prince Dauntless. No, she replies: “Fred.”
Once Upon a Mattress is a durable entry in the musical comedy catalog. While not in the first or second rank of musicals, it is a favorite among amateur groups due to the fairy tale provenance (this is “The Princess and the Pea,” after all), a goodly assortment of principal roles (everyone given a number in which to shine), and a score by composer Mary Rodgers and lyricist Marshall Barer that alternates between sunny and plain old funny.
[Read David Finkle’s ★★★☆☆ review here.]
While the musical is easy to do well, it is not easy to do brilliantly, alas and alack. The role of Winnifred needs a clown who can, in addition to performing the material, slay the audience with a lift of an eyebrow or the flash of a guilelessly innocent smile. The role was written for such a one, Nancy Walker (who never played it), and it made a superstar of the off-beat beginner chosen to star in the original production, Carol Burnett. Others have played it over the years, but none that I know of with any degree of Burnett’s success. (The Broadway production, upon Burnett’s departure, quickly collapsed; the two touring companies were costly failures; and the 1960 London company—starring young Jane Connell, imported for the occasion—shuttered in three weeks.)
Composer Rodgers, in those eyebrow-raising memoirs of hers (“Shy,” by Mary Rodgers and Jesse Green, conveniently on sale in the lobby), explains the problem with outspoken candor: “You need a real clown with a great voice, someone with a huge personality but immediately likable, and there aren’t many performers like that, as we unfortunately found out in the 1996 revival, when Sarah Jessica Parker got one of those four things right.” That revival was notable, alas and alack, in that none of the performers nor the director displayed anything approximating a sense of humor. Which is happily not the case here.
Foster, who has proved her mettle in any number of musical adventures since storming Broadway in the 2002 Thoroughly Modern Millie, turns out to perfectly fulfill Mary’s scorecard. A keenly intelligent performer, she makes it clear from her first low-comedy entrance that she is not interested in out-Burnetting Burnett, which even 65 years later is no easy task. Foster’s “Fred” is less starving for laughs than Carol’s (a performance preserved in two abridged television versions). Rather, Sutton gives us a guileless princess eager to be liked, capping every outlandish jape and sight-gag with a look of not-quite-convincing innocence as she slowly awaits the laughs to subside, occasionally wagging that mop-like wig they’ve put her in.
She is matched in the affair, every step of the way, by Urie. Watch him chase after his damsel, scaling the levels of the onstage platforms of the minimal set: he leaps, he falls, he battles with his princely tights while we battle to keep from falling out of our seats. Foster and Urie make a lovely pair; Daniels and Jackson make a lovely pair; and Harris, by herself, outdoes Snow White’s stepmother with a snarl.
There are other featured players on hand in Lear deBessonet’s production at Encores, namely J. Harrison Ghee (from Some Like It Hot), Francis Jue (who supported Foster and Harris in Thoroughly Modern Millie), and David Patrick Kelly (who played that Mysterious Man in deBessonet’s recent Into the Woods). Given the abbreviated rehearsal schedule for these Encores affairs, the rest should become more comfortable during the run (expanded to two weeks form the customary one). Most of the show is already in fine shape, including the limited choreography by Lorin Latarro and the work of her talented ensemble. Mention should be made of the lead dancer as well, but his name is not decipherable from the program.
Talk is already circulating about the possibility of Foster taking the show to Broadway once she wearies of making “The Worst Pies in London.” (The actress assumes the role of Mrs. Lovett at the Lunt next month.) The production needs some rethinking, yes; it is not presently in such fine shape as the City Center premieres of the recent Into the Woods or Parade. Once Upon a Mattress isn’t as strong a musical as the others, of course; but with the proper array of clowns working at full throttle, it would likely boost Broadway’s musical comedy quotient by several notches.
Once Upon a Mattress opened January 24, 2024, at City Center and runs through February 4. Tickets and information: nycitycenter.org
