In 1959, New York Times critic Brooks Atkinson heralded the arrival of a new musical comedy star in Once Upon a Mattress, a retelling of Hans Christian Anderson’s “The Princess and the Pea.” Carol Burnett, he wrote, has “a metallic voice, an ironic gleam, and an unfailing sense of the comic gesture” as she “discharges” the music “as though she were firing a field mortar.” Meanwhile, her co-star, Joe Bova, as Prince Dauntless the Drab, only received mention from Atkinson as one of several “winning young people” backing up Burnett.
Dauntless has always seemed a supporting part, inevitably overshadowed by Princess Winnifred the Woebegone, one of musical theater’s most boisterous, irrepressible heroines. But Michael Urie, playing Dauntless in the new Broadway revival of Once Upon a Mattress, a transfer of the Encores! production that opened in January for a two-week run at New York City Center, reveals that this bashful prince has had equal co-star potential inside him all along.
As Winnifred, Sutton Foster is buoyantly alive and dazzlingly reliable as ever in her 10th Broadway outing since Thoroughly Modern Millie, her 2002 star-is-born moment. Foster has giant shoes to fill but does Burnett proud in a performance that’s grown over the past six months from the giddy Winnifred that she offered earlier this year.
But Michael Urie, in transmogrifying the dopey Dauntless, doesn’t so much fill shoes as turn shoemaker, cobbling his own glorious take on the role that’s wildly silly but also moving. Foster upholds the reputation of Once Upon a Mattress—especially its goofy-gorgeous score by composer Mary Rodgers and lyricist Marshall Barer—as a quick-witted, big-hearted gem. It’s Urie who convinces, for the first time, that this musical isn’t just about a spunky, scrappy princess succeeding against the odds but also a real love story between two moonstruck misfits.
The plot, with an original book by Barer, Jay Thompson, and Dean Fuller, is a daffy take on the fairy tale. Queen Aggravain (Ana Gasteyer) insists that no one in her kingdom may marry before the over-coddled Dauntless. She’s set up a series of impossible princess tests to ensure that every eligible bachelorette will fail. The ditzy Sir Harry (Will Chase), upon discovering that his lady-in-waiting girlfriend, Lady Larken (Nikki Renee Daniels), is expecting a baby out of wedlock, gallops with urgency to bring back a mud-covered princess, Winnifred, from the swamplands. Grossed out by this moat-swimming, weight-lifting, goblet-guzzling damsel-in-zero-distress, the queen formulates a test guaranteed to knock Winnifred out of the running: She’ll sleep on 20 mattresses, all atop a single pea that only a true princess would detect.
For this revival, there’s been an effectively sitcom-y shakeup to the script from Amy Sherman-Palladino (creator of Gilmore Girls, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, and the Foster-starring Bunheads). She’s skimmed off the occasional sexist humor and infused some new rapid-fire jokes. Unnecessarily, she’s also condensed the Minstrel and the Jester into one character (a suave Daniel Breaker), jettisoning some joyful harmonies shared by the pair.
Once Upon a Mattress is sometimes seen as pure froth, but there’s real heart and wit beneath the foam. The heart is Rodgers, her soaring, jubilant music for “Normandy” and “Yesterday I Loved You” and “Many Moons Ago” just as rich as the melodies of her father Richard Rodgers and her son Adam Guettel. The wit is Barer, an undercelebrated talent whose lyrics for Once Upon a Mattress are about as clever and crystalline as they come: “My time is at a premium/For soon the world will see me/A maternal bride-to-be,” the pregnant Lady Larken sings, delivering one of musical theater’s sharpest internal rhymes. It’s almost impossible to pick out all of Barer’s buried wordplay at first listen, but it lands on the ear with silken clarity of meaning.
If Once Upon a Mattress, at its core, isn’t just riotously funny but whipsmart and lovely, too, so are its new stars. Foster and Urie have dotty, quirky chemistry: Winnifred’s unfiltered, fish-out-of-swamp-water vivacity instantly brings poor pampered, suffocated Dauntless out of his shell. They seem to share a special language that’s immediately apparent and utterly adorable. As Winnifred bellows the money note in “Shy,” the knights all bend backwards, blown over by her gale force, but Dauntless just throws his arms in the air in unanticipated ecstasy.
More than she did in January, Foster taps into Burnett’s menu of huge-eyed feats of facial expression, Tarzanian exuberance, and vocal idiosyncrasy. She yodels heartily when she sings “The Swamps of Home.” But she’s also very much her own energy source, melding the brassy optimism of her Millie with the dotty physicality of her recent Mrs. Lovett in Sweeney Todd and the belching indelicacy of her Fiona in Shrek. She pulls off a wordless set piece involving a bowl of grapes that might be the funniest three minutes currently on Broadway: As Atkinson wrote of Burnett, Foster’s also got that “unfailing sense of the comic gesture.”
Urie, a highlight of last year’s Spamalot revival, is also a delightful scene partner for Gasteyer (delicious here as she shows off her rich soprano, fierce belt, and surprise violin chops as a despotic mother desperately clawing to keep her son close) and an endearing David Patrick Kelly as the mute king. It’s not that Dauntless is dumb. While he grasps that his mother is micromanaging his life (“Sometimes I get the funniest feeling that you don’s want me to get married,” he says at one point), he doesn’t know what to do about it. The prince may be pathetic at first—he climbs steps with the tentativeness of a kindergartener—but Urie feelingly communicates his man-child-to-man evolution as Winnifred’s whimsy and wonder convert him.
Mostly, these performances distract from skimpy production values. The show’s minimal set, with its proscenium-wide stairs that take up most of the stage, is virtually identical to the scenery for director Lear deBessonet’s last Encores! transfer, Into the Woods, save for a few added medieval pillars. The lack of traditional lush Broadway trappings—a couple scenes take place in front of an undecorated black curtain—feels lazy rather than charming. Lorin Latarro’s cartoonish choreography similarly seems to call out for some sprucing-up for Broadway.
But deBessonet’s staging does generously keep the wonderful orchestra, 16 players strong under the lively baton of Annbritt duChateau, visible to the audience at all times. When Winnifred first appears, dripping, over the palace walls, she’s actually clambering out of the strings section: a genuine princess, born of song, come to finally meet her match.
Into the Woods is now running at the Hudson Theatre.
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