By Daniel D'Addario
Encores! ONCE UPON A MATTRESS Highlights | New York City Center
Near the climax of "Once Upon a Mattress," now revived for the second time on Broadway, Princess Winnifred (Sutton Foster) is at the end of her rope. After the frustrations of the previous two hours or so, Winnifred, the beleaguered wannabe bride of a reckless prince, grimaces and cries, "What are you, some kind of nut?"
The audience at the Hudson Theatre was left reeling, but it wasn’t hard to sense — in this moment and throughout the production — that there was no joke in it, and that it didn’t quite work. “Once Upon a Mattress,” critically unloved since its 1959 debut but revived in community theater, barely has a story to speak of. (It’s based on “The Princess and the Pea,” the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale whose plot can be told in three sentences — four, if you’re feeling verbose.) And this production — adapted by “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” creator Amy Sherman-Palladino and seen earlier this year as part of City Center’s Encores series — attempts to fix the play’s shortcomings with an attitude that’s a little less than winning.
About those shortcomings: As Winnifred, Foster is central to the story — she's the suitor whose sensibilities are tested by placing a single pea under a stack of 20 mattresses and seeing if it disturbs her sleep. But she doesn't enter the proceedings until fairly late in the first act, after a fairly brutal period of setting up the stakes and the kingdom's political climate. The heir to the throne, Michael Urie's Prince Dauntless, wants to marry, but his mother, Ana Gasteyer's Queen Aggravain, is too jealous to allow it and sets up impenetrable tests for each bride. Simple enough — and yet the wait for Foster's arrival grows tedious. Likewise, once the test is set up, the second act spins its wheels, with musical numbers that tangentially or basically have nothing to do with the show's plot.
