By Christopher Caggiano

This Mattress is all about Sutton Foster. And that’s a good thing

Sutton Foster in Once Upon A Mattress. Photo: Joan Marcus

It’s been over 20 years since Sutton Foster first entered the Broadway pantheon. And how blessed we all are for it.

She’s just as sprightly and endearing as the day she stepped on stage as Millie Dillmount in Thoroughly Modern Millie (2002). She’s as versatile and hilarious as she was as Janet Van de Graff in The Drowsy Chaperone (2006). She’s as self-assured and commanding as she was as Reno Sweeney in Anything Goes (2011). Foster has always possessed an unquestioned mastery of physical comedy, an infectious sense of joy, and a killer belt.

But let me ask you this: What the hell took us so long to cast Sutton Foster as Princess Winnifred in Once Upon a Mattress? What woeful lack of imagination prevented us from seeing the absolute perfection of this matchup? I mean, FFS, people!

This new Broadway production is a transfer of the recent Encores! staging from earlier this year. At Encores!, the production felt a bit underbaked, as though it needed another week of rehearsal. Many of the performers, including Foster, didn’t seem to have found their comedic footing yet. Even so, the staging was well received and attended, and, in short order, everyone was raving about Foster’s performance. Keep in mind that the performer is now considered so bankable she received equal billing with Hugh Jackman for the admittedly lackluster and otherwise regrettable 2022 revival of The Music Man.

To the surprise of no one, some 20 or so producers got together to bring this Mattress to the Main Stem, specifically the Hudson Theater, recently vacated by the smash hit revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along. And the intervening weeks have given Foster a chance to hone her performance to comedic perfection.

As you may know, Once Upon a Mattress is a comedic retelling of “The Princess and the Pea,” in which an evil queen (Ana Gasteyer) imposes impossible tests on potential brides to prevent her son, Prince Dauntless (Michael Urie), from marrying. When the unconventional Princess Winnifred (Foster) arrives, she undergoes a test requiring her to detect the presence of pea under 20 mattresses. Comic hijinks ensue. The role made Carol Burnett a star and, despite the damage that Sarah Jessica Parker inflicted on the show’s reputation in 1996, Mattress remains a choice vehicle for the right female star.

Some of you might be thinking, “Hey, I did Mattress back in high school. Isn’t the book kind of…um…creaky?” Well, for this new production, the book has been adapted by Amy Sherman-Palladino, creator of The Gilmore Girls, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, and the short-lived Bunheads, the last of which, of course, starred Sutton Foster.

The main changes here seem to be that the minstrel character has been eliminated, along with the expendable song, “The Minstrel, the Jester, and I.” Most of the minstrel’s stage business is assigned to the jester, played here with gusto but some uneasiness by Daniel Breaker, as though he’s not quite sure whether he’s allowed to ham it up. (Go for it, Daniel.)

David Patrick Kelly, Nikki Renee Daniels, and Daniel Breaker in Once Upon A Mattress. Photo: Joan Marcus

Beyond those changes, Sherman-Palladino hasn’t so much revised the book as gilded it with one-liners, much as Amber Ruffin threw a couple of yuk-yuks into this past season’s dreadful revival of The Wiz. (Read my review.) Many of the punchlines land, but a lot of them get lost in Lear deBessonet’s loose comic direction. In fact, aside from Foster’s bravura performance, the production still feels kind of limp, partly from the fact that deBessonet is allowing just a bit too much impromptu comic business. Improv is great in rehearsal but live it’s risky. Eventually, this kind of broad comedy needs to be precise.

Adding to the sense of looseness is Lorin Latarro’s rather ill-fitting musical staging. I praised Latarro’s work in the recent Broadway revival of The Who’s Tommy, commenting that she seemed to have come quite far since her distracting work in Waitress, and that she had revealed herself as a “savvy and varied choreographer.” (Read my review.) With Mattress, she seems to have taken a step backward, with steps that are pointlessly complicated and awkward.

For instance, Latarro ill-advisedly adheres strictly to the words of the script that describe the Spanish Panic dance, which takes place at the ball that the queen has thrown to tire Princess Winifred out: “Flip your skirts, open close, right, right, right.”

Latarro has set these steps so that it requires the performers to execute three forward-moving taps with the right or left foot, which becomes increasingly cumbersome, and visually unappealing, as the music speeds up. Admittedly, this is a personal pet peeve: I’m always put off when choreographers create routines that even professional dancers couldn’t make look good.

As I’ve said, Foster has honed her performance as Winnifred to a high comic sheen. There’s a particularly hilarious routine involving a chalice full of grapes that recalls the famous Hello, Dolly! dumpling-eating scene. It’s the sort of broad but inspired silliness that only someone with Foster’s confidence and comic sensibility could truly pull off. And it’s priceless.

In addition to Foster, Michael Urie as Dauntless and Michael Patrick Kelly as King Sextimus have also made the transfer from City Center to Broadway. And, like Foster, both seem to have grown more comfortable in their roles as well. At Encores!, Urie seemed like he would eventually be great in the part, but his conviction and characterization weren’t quite there yet.

Ana Gasteyer and Michael Urie in Once Upon A Mattress. Photo: Joan Marcus

Now, apart from some odd and unfunny business about Dauntless not being able to climb stairs, Urie feels like a natural as the gawkish, lovestruck prince. In fact, there’s a great deal more compatibility between Urie and Foster in this new iteration, to the point where you can really sense the two of them falling goofily in love with each other, and it’s adorable.

Michael Patrick Kelly is impish and lovable as King Sextimus the Silent. There were scenes where I couldn’t take my eyes off his nonverbal antics, although that may be partly because I recently discovered that, in his younger days, Kelly played that sinister gang member in the movie The Warriors (1979) who puts three beer bottles on his fingers, clinks them together, and creepily calls out, “Warriors! Come out to play-ee-yay!” (Will Lin-Manuel Miranda turn this iconic moment into a brief rap aria in his upcoming stage version of the film? The mind reels.)

Once Upon a Mattress is currently scheduled to run at the Hudson Theater through November 30. This seems like an odd end date, since producers know all too well that the run-up to the winter holidays tends to be extremely lucrative for family shows. Since the Hudson doesn’t have another scheduled tenant until March of 2025 (the first Broadway production of The Last Five Years, with Tony winner Adrienne Warren and — God, help us all — Nick Jonas), it seems more than possible that Mattress will extend at least through the new year.

Christopher Caggiano is a freelance writer and editor living in Stamford, Connecticut. He has written about theater for a variety of outlets, including TheaterMania.com, American Theatre, and Dramatics magazine. He also taught musical-theater history for 16 years and is working on numerous book projects based on his research.