One way to win over an audience is simply to wear yourself out for their amusement, which is what Sutton Foster does for most of Encores!’s revival of Once Upon a Mattress, and especially during its first-act finale. As Princess Winnifred, practicing for whatever tests the snooty Queen Aggravain may throw at her, she runs circuits around the City Center stage, performing escalating feats of strength (picking up a goofily large prop dumbbell), flexibility (the splits!), musicality (a bit of operatic yodeling), drinking (first with steins, then with a beer helmet), and more. It’s something like High-Intensity Musical-Comedy Interval Training, sure to get the heart pumping and the crowd laughing by sheer force of repetition.
As a show, Once Upon a Mattress is built for such old-fashioned “do whatever it takes to make ’em laugh†comedic gambits. The musical riff on “The Princess and the Pea†originated as a group project of sorts at the Tamiment adult summer camp, where the campers included Mary Rodgers (who wrote the music), Marshall Barer (the lyrics and the book), and Jay Thompson and Dean Fuller (also the book), purpose-built for the talent they had on hand, which happened to include the supernova discovery that was Carol Burnett. Mattress made it to Broadway in 1959, where it bounced between five theaters — “the most moving show on Broadway,†was Rodgers’s joke subtitle — and was memorialized in filmed TV specials starring Burnett in 1964 and 1972. It lives on most potently in many, many high-school, summer-camp, and drama productions: You’ve perhaps starred in one or gone to a friend’s out of obligation. City Center’s revival is full of real pros — Michael Urie as Prince Dauntless, J. Harrison Ghee as the Jester, Cheyenne Jackson and Nikki Renée Daniels winsomely playing winsome lovers, Harriet Harris in full high-comedic dudgeon as Queen Aggravain — but it has set them all loose to be as goofy and sophomoric as possible, with results that feel appropriately like the work of adults on theatrical vacation.
Lear DeBessonet, who also directed Encores!’s storybook version of Into the Woods, encourages the feeling of a pantomime, putting the cast in primary colors like Medieval Times waitstaff and encouraging them to gnaw at whatever scenery they please. Foster makes her grand entrance during “Shy†in an immense wig and tattered outfit, resembling one of those desperate cartoon women in pop-up app ads you get on your phone, after which she pulls a raccoon out of the wig and chucks leeches from her back into the audience. Foster doesn’t match the gale force of Burnett’s belt, which powered a lot of the show’s comedy, but she so commits to the physicality of her lovelorn swamp woman that it rights the ship. Again and again, she’ll go to whatever lengths it takes for a laugh. She makes a set piece out of writhing atop her pile of mattresses at center stage, always an inch away from falling off, part of the joke being that Foster herself appears willing to risk limb for material this broad.
That tone is a good fit for a shorter run at Encores!, even if this is a case where you might root against a Broadway transfer, given that the raggedy charm that works for a short-run engagement might not be enough to justify a Broadway ticket, and the antics themselves could well wear out a cast. It wears even by Mattress’s own second act, where the convolutions of the plot get arcane and the jokes repeat — as impishly delightful as David Patrick Kelly is as the mute king, you can only watch so many lines delivered through charades. Amy Sherman-Palladino has done a pass on the book, though her writing style has always been so close to that of a ’50s musical in the first place (The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel was proof of this) that her changes tend to blend in. The Minstrel and Jester have merged into one, a few more jokes fall on the side of the show’s women, and there are some circular bits of dialogue that make you imagine the characters are strolling around Stars Hollow, but otherwise it’s all very recognizably Mattress, for better and for worse. Whenever the show gets too far from the adventures of Winnifred and Dauntless, such as when it’s explicating the history between Ghee’s Jester and Francis Jue’s daffy wizard, you long for things to get back to the pea already.
But oh, when the show works, it really works. Urie and Foster, in particular, are a great odd-duck comedic pairing. He’s honed his line deliveries into extended monotone whines and petulant stomps of his feet while she is going for gangly tomboy swagger. Their attraction doesn’t make much logical sense, but you can’t imagine them with anyone else, simply because no one else is as strange as they are — plus they both seem so excited about leeches. Let these weirdos rule the kingdom, at least for a couple of weeks.
Once Upon a Mattress is at New York City Center through February 4.