At the climax of “He Was in Bed,” now on Broadway for a second time, Princess Winifred (Sutton Foster) has reached the end of her rope. After the frustration of the previous two hours or so, Winifred, the beleaguered bride who aspires to marry a foolish prince, trembles and declares, “Who are you, are you crazy?”
The audience at the Hudson Theater lost its nerve, but it wasn’t hard to feel—at this point and throughout the show—outside of an inside joke that felt like a joke, one that didn’t quite work. “Once Upon a Mattress,” which has been underwhelming since its 1959 debut but has been revived on a regular basis in community theater, doesn’t have a story to tell. (It’s based on “The Princess and the Pea,” the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale whose plot can be conveyed in three sentences—four, if you’re feeling verbose.) And this production—adapted by “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” creator Amy Sherman-Palladino and previously performed earlier this year as part of City Center’s Encores series—tends to try to resolve the play’s shortcomings with a less-than-winning attitude.
As for those flaws: As Winifred, Foster is the center of the story—the matchmaker whose sensibility is tested by placing a single pea under a stack of twenty mattresses and seeing if it disturbs her sleep. But she doesn’t enter the proceedings until deep into the first act, after a fairly relentless period of setting up the stakes and political environment of the kingdom. The heir to the throne, Prince Valiant (Michael Urie), wants to marry, but his mother, Queen Agravaine (Ana Gasteyer), is too jealous to allow it, and sets tests that no bride would pass. Simple enough—yet waiting for Foster to arrive is exhausting. Likewise, once the test is set, the wheels turn in the second act, where the musical numbers are either indirect or irrelevant to the plot.
At least one of those stories, “Too Soft Shoes,” about a court jester’s relationship with his father, is quite brilliant, and is conveyed by Daniel Brecker (one of the show’s standouts). Yet there’s a mystery at the heart of “Once Upon a Mattress.” The show couldn’t work without Winifred, who grew up in a swamp and whose bad manners irritate Agravaine. The story, such as it is, revolves around her. Yet when Foster is on stage, an element of her basic miscasting makes a noise. Carol Burnett is playing the role for the first time, and Foster seems to be aiming for a Burnett-style zany comedy as she climbs across the stage; throughout the show, she shifts her weight like a boxer, as if she’s so full of energy that she simply has to express it. During “Shy,” Winifred’s big opening song, the actress saunters around the stage like a child shuffling her feet on the kitchen floor to imitate an ice skater.
Foster is a physically fit actress—her rhythmic dancing in the 2011 Tony-nominated revival of Anything Goes is now the stuff of theater legend. But she’s a delicate artist, and her portrayal of a character who is inherently careless and foolish doesn’t come naturally. The line “What are you, some kind of lunatic?” is poorly written, but it’s also a line Foster can’t sell.
But we sense that she is trying, and this effort gives Once Upon a Bed its uneasy, tense quality. (A key scene in which Winifred, hungry and unaccustomed to the treats, stuffs her face with grapes has an anxious, needy edge—it draws laughter that the writing doesn’t deserve. It’s more “Fear Factor” than musical theater.) Other actors do better—Urry is a wonderfully innocent prince, her straight face and clear manner allowing her to revel in the queen’s vanity and delusions.
These qualities—the prince’s naivety, the queen’s grandeur—might seem enough to give Once Upon a Bed a reason to be so. At its best, and in fleeting moments, the play feels like a “broken fairy tale” of the kind that made Rocky and Bullwinkle so popular when it first ran. One senses the desire, on the part of the production, to say something about children’s stories, to develop or complicate the myths we learn in our youth. Into the Woods is an impossible comparison, but a shred of this show’s curiosity about the stories we tell would have been welcome.
By contrast, this show insists on trying to pull it off on sheer bravado, refusing to attempt anything beyond physical comedy (which Foster will attempt at everything). The direction and production are of the highest quality—I was blown away by Andrea Hood’s costumes, for example. (I was particularly partial to the ornate sleeves on the clown’s costume—a costume that is more indulgent and clever than anything else in the script.) Finally, the show can’t get over the casting of Foster, a wonderful actress who simply can’t find her way into a character with such an unsophisticated identity. Like the beans under your mattress, this is a small thing that, as the evening goes on, becomes a huge thing.
