Theater evaluate
ONCE UPON A MATTRESS
Two hours and quarter-hour with one interlude. On the Hudson Theatre, 141 W forty fourth St.
Within the fairy-tale send-up “Once Upon a Mattress,” Prince Dauntless the Drab in any case meets the girl he’s been ready his entire time for — Winnifred the Woebegone.
There’s a indistinguishable feeling of destiny within the untouched Broadway revival of the bouncy 1959 comedy that opened Monday night time on the Hudson Theatre.
A display and a celeb have aligned. Mary Rodgers’ musical has discovered Sutton Foster.
In fact, Winnifred, uncouth and unwashed, is some distance from the image of a princess. However it’s sun-baked to consider a extra highest are compatible for the position than Foster, whose 26-year level résumé reads like a highway map to “Mattress.”
Within the raggedy royal, we will be able to see sun shades of Janet “I don’t wanna show off!” Van de Graaff of “The Drowsy Chaperone,” unintended ogre Fiona of “Shrek the Musical” or even her flip within the contemporary “Sweeney Todd.” Mrs. Lovett most probably has some critters nesting in her hair, too.
What a winningly humorous mashup it’s.
The manufacturing, directed in haste through Lear deBessonet, isn’t with out its flaws. For my part, I’m bored with lazily staged, barebones Encores! concert events being lugged to Broadway like an incredibly great sofa any individual discovered at the curb. Nonetheless, Foster is this kind of ruin that you just forgive many of the peripheral issues.
Bring to mind “Mattress” because the foremother of princess-behaving-badly tales; the ones mold-breaking damsels who reason misery with their unapologetic individuality.
There would most likely be incorrect “Bad Cinderella” have been it no longer for “Once Upon a Mattress” … which is a quote I suspicion I’ll spot at the marquee.
The display, with a well-dressed untouched conserve through “Gilmore Girls” author Amy Sherman-Palladino, is a spin at the kids’s tale “The Princess and the Pea.” It’s eager in a kingdom whose citizenry is uninterested with doofy Dauntless’ (Michael Urie) never-ending effort to make a choice a bride, as a result of, till he does, incorrect alternative disciplines can get married.
Urie, who, having simply starred in “Monty Python’s Spamalot,” has schlepped from fortress to fortress, is hilarious and right away endearing as an inheritor with fewer mind cells than a hairbrush.
Input — throughout the murky moat, coated in dust and grass — Princess Winnifred. Dauntless is right away smitten, year his unholy mom Queen Aggravain (Ana Gasteyer) would favor to smite her.
Because the monarch, I anticipated Gasteyer, so memorable on “Saturday Night Live,” to get extra laughs. She nails being nasty, however comes trim of being love-to-hate.
Ultimately, Aggravain places Fred to the wedding take a look at: Is the slob a dainty plenty girl {that a} minute pea positioned underneath 20 mattresses would ban her from napping?
The palace is i’m busy through many alternative zanies whose subplots are extra forgettable. “Mattress” was once, upcoming all, at first a celeb car for comedic powerhouse Carol Burnett.
Pompous Sir Harry (Will Chase) is in love with Girl Larken, performed through Nikki Renée Daniels with a resplendent soprano and an ear for a punch sequence.
And Brooks Ashmanskas’ Master can handiest top Celebration Town enchanment methods, year Daniel Breaker’s narrating Jester is foolish till he’s impulsively haunted.
The most efficient a part of the musical, although, are Winnifred’s fish-out-water antics. Fabulous Foster turns grape-eating into an Olympic recreation and does a keg rise year in tune. And, in an oddball quirk, she offers frantic Winnifred stressed leg syndrome, who prefer Russian squat kicks to handshakes.
The actress’ knockout “Shy” and “Happily Ever After” deliver her tough belt again upcoming its sabbatical all over “The Music Man” and “Sweeney.”
I handiest want the staging round her have been higher.
But any other manufacturing that started in Town Heart’s Encores! program arrives on Broadway with a most commonly emptied suitcase: a couple of pillars and awkward steps as a collection, and the orchestra taking on part the level.
DeBessonet’s “Mattress” isn’t a considerate, conceptual relief — it’s simply the method Encores! nearly at all times employs to show off an used rating. That’s high-quality for fifty fifth Boulevard, however it’s a lot too thin and simple for an evening out on Broadway.
There aren’t any trendy seeing to move the target audience or bolster the humor, and the forged slightly has room plenty to bop the jerky “Spanish Panic.”
However a real big name like Foster is exceedingly uncommon. So long as she’s enjoying Winnifred, no person’s going house woebegone.
