Broadway Review: Sutton Foster Sizzles in Limp ‘Once Upon a Mattress’

Into the Woods —aka, the divine, luminous, any-superlative-you-fancy Into the Woods —was the last Encores production to migrate from City Center to Broadway. It was Sondheim buffed to its wittiest, sharpest, most moving sheen, with a pantheon of glorious performances including Julia Lester as a very attitude-y Little Red Ridinghood.

In contrast, Once Upon a Mattress (Hudson Theatre, booking to Nov. 30) , the latest show to execute the same hop, skip, and jump to Broadway, is making the journey thanks to the name and standout stage performance of one person: Sutton Foster who plays Princess Winnifred, aka Fred, who not only saves the day on stage but also rescues this puny show from total inconsequentiality.

The multi-Tony winning/nominated Foster is a master of physical comedy; if Lucille Ball infamously stomped grapes, Foster here induces paroxysms of laughter by eating and spitting them out, and eventually throwing random things into the first rows of audience in a mini-frenzy that underlines just how not of our world “Fred” is.

The 1959 musical, based on Hans Christian Andersen’s The Princess and the Pea —book by Jay Thompson, Marshall Baker, and Dean Fuller; music by Mary Rodgers, lyrics by Marshall Baker—is inoffensively charming, but not compelling; it feels like a fairytale, but without any of Into the Woods ’ brains and guts, just the simplest of notes for minds who wish no demands be made of them.

If Foster’s boldface name (and brilliant acting and singing chops) has helped Mattress make its journey a few blocks south, the other performers—including Michael Urie, Ana Gasteyer, Daniel Breaker, and Brooks Ashmanskas, as well as a great company of dancers—are also working so, so, SO hard to make an overlong, toothless show—understandably rarely revived—work as fluently as it can.

The story, which has been adapted by Amy Sherman-Palladino with some funny, contemporary-sounding jabs and feints, is as insubstantial as the shockingly under-designed set. The aimless but sweet Prince Dauntless (Urie) is seeking a bride. His meddling, domineering mother Queen Aggravain (Gasteyer, who deserves an inaugural Tony Award for harrumphing) invents ever more elaborate tests for prospective partners they are destined to fail. A jester (Breaker) acts as a narrator, David Patrick Kelly plays the queen’s husband, cursed to muteness. Ashmanskas is a wizard who does fun magic tricks on the fly. Lady Larken (Nikki Renée Daniels and Sir Harry (Will Chase) are another couple plopped into the show to pad it out with a few more romantic misunderstandings.

The show is like a long search for something, never rising to anything interesting. Prince Dauntless and Princess Winnifred seem less a love match than two very strange people—they are human of body but thoroughly whacked-out of mind—fortunate to have met each other, and who appreciate each other’s different isolation to the world around them.

The other characters get hints of stories that are blown away on the wind. Yes, there are songs and sequences that briefly set the stage alight, like Winnifred’s “Shy,” sung just after she has emerged from swimming the moat of the castle and dragging creatures from her hair, is one.

However, these rousing company numbers are played against one of the most meager and unattractive sets on Broadway; a few pillars and steps are more than fine for an Encores production where the emphasis is on singing and gathering big names for a small number of performances. But a four-plus month Broadway run is a different thing. The Hudson Theatre (and its stage) is one of Broadway’s most beautiful and inviting spaces; the last production there was the rightly hailed, critically and audience-adored Merrily We Roll Along . Once Upon a Mattress suffers vastly by comparison. It looks hastily thrown together and unambitious.

And so it falls to Foster, Urie, and co to valiantly keep the wink-wink humor and performance balls in the air. This they do, and in Foster’s case with polished, perfect timing and spirited physicality. She betters the grapes scene with another where Fred thrashes around to find the right spot to sleep on the mattress of the show’s title—part of yet another wicked plot by the queen to ensure she does not receive her princess status. Foster’s body twists and drops and angles this way and that trying to find the right spot.

Yes, hilarious—but for the stretches where Foster isn’t on stage, you sure do miss her. The other actors serve up some appealing light comedy and subplots to keep the motor puttering, but in act two this all amounts to one flimsy diversion after another. Once Upon a Mattress is mostly alright, then at moments—thanks to Foster and the others—very funny, but never stunning. After this Broadway run it heads to Los Angeles. Its producers should be very grateful to Sutton Foster.

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