Three Musicals: Once Upon a Mattress, She Loves Me and A Wonderful World

Sutton Foster as Princess Winnifred in Once Upon a Mattress.

Once Upon a Mattress, the Looney Tunes alteration of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale “The Princess and the Pea” with book by Jay Thompson, Marshall Barer and Dean Fuller, music by Mary Rodgers and lyrics by Barer, opened on Broadway in 1959 and has been playing high schools and children’s theatres ever since. This musical is so familiar to stage kids and their loyal parents that it’s easy to forget how jovial and funny it is, and how tuneful and witty the score is. So it was a boon to New York theatregoers that Encores! opted to stage it early in the year with Sutton Foster as Princess Winnifred – a production, adapted by Amy Sherman-Palladino and staged by Lear de Bessonet, that wound up in the current Broadway season, with most of the Encores! cast, for a limited but enthusiastically received run. (There was a revival in the late nineties starring Sarah Jessica Parker.)

In the musical, Winnifred is the latest candidate to marry Prince Dauntless, whose smothering, stentorian mother, Queen Aggravain, has set impossible tests for her predecessors so he will stay tied to her regal apron strings. The lovable but henpecked king, Sextimus, has been struck mute by a curse that proclaims he will remain silent until the mouse devours the hawk. The queen has declared a moratorium on court marriages until Dauntless is wed, so the situation has become dire. And when Winnifred, whose home kingdom is in the marshlands, appears, so eager that she swims the moat leading up to the castle, first Dauntless and then the entire court – apart, of course, from Aggravain – falls in love with her. Then it’s up to Dauntless’s allies to discover Aggravain’s latest top-secret impossible test and rig it in Winnifred’s favor. It is, as we know, a sensitivity test: if a single pea under twenty down mattresses can keep her from getting a night’s sleep, “then a true princess is she.”

It’s hard to imagine a better Broadway debut for Carol Burnett, who had just completed her first season on The Garry Moore Show on CBS. You can get a fair idea of Burnett’s approach, an inspired mash-up of vaudeville and revue-sketch comedy, in the abbreviated 1964 TV version, which is available on YouTube and features three other members of the original Broadway cast: Jane White as the Queen, Joseph Bova as Dauntless and that invaluable comic treasure Jack Gilford as the King. A young Elliott Gould, who had not yet moved from musical theatre to movies, shows up as the Jester. In her delightful memoir, Shy, Mary Rodgers admits that her own favorite song is the half-sung, half-mimed duet “Man to Man Talk,” in which Sextimus teaches his son about the birds and the bees via a game of charades, and Gilford and Bova’s performance of it is sublime. (Once Upon a Mattress returned to television in 1972 and 2005, both times with Burnett, but in the third go-round she played the Queen and Tracey Ullman replaced her as the princess.)

When I was a child in Montreal, I was taken to see the touring cast, led by another legendary TV comic, Imogene Coca; I remember loving her but I wish I could recall just how she played it. You could make a tantalizing list of dream Winnifreds among gifted contemporary female clowns, but could anyone top it except Sutton Foster? I’ve noted before that we’re probably in the most overstocked era for extraordinary divas in the history of musical theatre: Kelli O’Hara, Audra McDonald, Bernadette Peters, Patti LuPone, Donna Murphy, Victoria Clark, Kristen Chenoweth, Philippa Soo, Christine Ebersole, Sutton Foster. But though aficionados come out to see everything these remarkable ladies attempt, not everyone has proven to be right for every role, and I would never have cast Foster as Marian the Librarian in The Music Man. (Nor would I have cast Hugh Jackman opposite her.) Foster embodies the strain of musical theatre that poured out of burlesque and was represented by Broadway personalities like Jimmy Durante and Bert Lahr, Ethel Merman and the pre-Hollywood Bob Hope, who could keep a show buzzing by treating the material as somehow, mysteriously both electric and pliant. That’s what made Foster so fantastic to look at and listen to when she played Reno Sweeney in Kathleen Marshall’s marvelous 2011 revival of Anything Goes, especially when she joined Joel Grey on “Friendship,” which they turned into a game to determine who could crack up the other one. (In the version that reached the West End only after COVID and has screened on American channels, Robert Lindsey proved to be just as loose an improviser as Grey.)

That’s what Foster accomplished again in Once Upon a Mattress, only it felt to me that you couldn’t predict which of her co-stars she might take on during any given show. She gave a glittering, kinetic, old-pro performance. Foster had some of Burnett’s trademark qualities – her warmth, her generosity with the other actors, and that modesty which is all the more beguiling because modesty is hardly a quality on which big Broadway musical stars thrive. But she also had the lunatic comic commitment and demon timing of a silent-movie genius when she turned Winnifred’s hopeless battle with the lumps in her towering pile of mattresses into quite a different sort of test: of the performer’s physical stamina and inventiveness. There was an earlier, out-of-the-blue routine that also turned the audience into helplessly giggling victims, involving Winnifred’s gorging herself on grapes. And of course, anyone who knew the musical could hardly wait to see how Foster would handle Winnifred’s trio of solos, “Shy” and “The Swamps of Home” in the first act and “Happily Ever After.” They were stupendous – especially the last, where her divine comic bafflement became touching. (Foster is a fine actress, in addition to her other attributes.)

The Broadway transfer retained the simplicity of an Encores! production, but the best of those always give the choreographer an opportunity to show off, and Loren Latarro’s numbers were enjoyable and skillfully danced. The supporting cast showcased Daniel Breaker as the Jester, Brooks Ashmanskas as the Wizard, David Patrick Kelly as the King and Nikki Renée Daniels as Lady Larkin, whose incipient pregnancy makes her and her swain, Sir Harry (Will Chase), especially impatient for Dauntless to find a royal candidate who can outwit his impossible mama. There’s room for more than one love affair to cross the footlights in a good musical, and the audience at the performance I caught seemed to fall hard for Daniels. In act one Ana Gasteyer, playing the chattering, tyrannical Queen, was more controlled in her numbers (“Sensitivity” and “Spanish Panic”) than in her comic scenes, but by the second act she’d won me over. The big surprise was Michael Urie as Dauntless. He’s always left me cold, but maybe he just hadn’t found the right part until Once Upon a Mattress. He was the second funniest performer on that stage.

Alicia Kaori as Amalia in She Loves Me.

Long Wharf Theatre lost its theatre at the crossroads of Routes 91 and 95 two years seasons ago and has been producing in a variety of New Haven venues. Their current revival of She Loves Me, the joyous musical based on the great Ernst Lubitsch-Samson Raphaelson romantic comedy The Shop Around the Corner, is the first I’ve seen since they left the old place, and it initiates their sixtieth season. The company’s artistic director, Jacob G. Padrón, has mounted it in an intimate flexible space, The Lab at ConnCORP, using a tennis-court seating configuration, and it feels just right for a piece that probably didn’t make much of a splash on Broadway in 1963 – the year before Bock and Harnick turned out Fiddler on the Roof – because it was so small and understated.

The show, which is set in a Budapest parfumerie during the Depression – the principal characters are its owner, Mr. Maraczek, and his staff – and concludes on Christmas Eve, is a seasonal gift and one of my favorite musicals. (For nearly four decades I have been listening to the original cast album, starring Daniel Massey and Barbara Cook, every year on my way to and from a ritual Christmas dinner with friends.) The Long Wharf mounting is very pleasant and makes excellent use of the non-traditional space, which places a combo in an alcove designed by Emmie Finckel to suggest a café stage; Miles Plant is music director and Andy Einhorn has pared down the original orchestrations. Both Jiyoun Chang’s lighting and Sarita P. Fellows’s costumes suggest the virtues of collaboration on a modest production. Of course I sympathize with the resource limitations, but even a small show like this one demands more than four people in the chorus – they bring off the last ensemble number, “Twelve Days to Christmas,” nimbly, but the reduced size kills the jokes in the first one, “Sounds While Selling,” and the Café Imperial scene at the end of the first act looks woefully underpopulated. (The busy, lively choristers are Jacob Heimer, Kara Mikula, Aurelia Williams and Sumi Yu; I admired them all but especially Mikula.)

Alicia Kaori, who plays the ingénue, Amalia Balash – the part Margaret Sullavan created, unforgettably, in Lubitsch’s movie – is quite wonderful, especially when she sings “Will He Like Me?” Mariand Torres brings not just wit but variety to the secondary female role, Ilona Ritter, who is so susceptible that she keeps falling into the traps laid by her duplicitous lover, Steven Kodaly. She finally breaks it off with him near the end of act one when he abandons her one too many times on the night of a promised date. Her response is the song “I Resolve,” usually performed in a fiery tone but to which Torres brings an unanticipated note of melancholy. There are seven principal characters, four of whom are well played; Raphael Nash Thompson is an affecting Maraczek (whom Kodaly victimizes, too, but in a different way) and Felix Torrez-Ponce is charming as Arpad, the delivery boy who winds up as a clerk. I was less sold on the other three men. Julius Thomas III as Georg Nowack, the Jimmy Stewart/Daniel Massey part, sings sweetly but his portrayal lacks depth and emotional range. Danny Bolero, playing Georg’s best friend, Sipos, tends to fall back on stock comic routines. And Graham Stevens, who has been cast as both Kodaly and the headwaiter in the Café Imperial scene, doesn’t get either of them. The problem may be that they’re both caricatures and either he doesn’t have the right style or he’s trying to render them in a way that the Joe Masteroff script won’t allow, but he comes off as bland in both roles.

Padrón’s staging is fluid, which works well in this venue. It’s a mistake, though, to turn Sipos’s solo, “Perspective,“ and the first-act finale, “Dear Friend” (oddly omitted from the program), into Brechtian musical numbers – especially “Dear Friend,” a solo for Amalia that ought to break the audience’s collective heart. And though Chris Bell, the choreographer, works in this non-dance musical that sustains its spirit without drawing attention to itself, the “Where’s My Other Shoe?” duet between Georg and Amalia is rather clumsy. Most importantly, though, the production conveys the sweetness of the musical and the complicated vulnerabilities of the characters, which Raphaelson and Lubitsch enshrined and Masteroff, Bock and Harnick captured.

James Monroe Iglehart and the company of A Wonderful World. (Photo: Jeremy Daniels)

Finally I wanted to touch briefly on A Wonderful World: The Louis Armstrong Musical at Studio 54, which I saw about a month ago, shortly after it opened. It’s a jukebox musical bio, and its book, by Aurin Squire, isn’t any better than that of Jersey Boys or Beautiful. In fact, it’s worse, with dramatic scenes dropping down like the scenery in The Play That Goes Wrong. (Meanwhile, the scenery itself – designed, along with the video, by Adam Koch and Steven Royal – is delectable, as are Toni-Leslie James’s costumes and Cory Pattak’s lighting.) Any time the show gets around to race, it grinds to a halt, despite the director Christopher Renshaw’s general skill at keeping it moving; hard as it may be to imagine a play about one of the most staggering African American talents in the history of music in which the scenes about race feel obligatory, they sure do here. Whatever the writing issues, though, the show is a blast. This is one of those musicals that seems to have more amazing singers and dancers than you can count, and Rickey Tripp’s choreography makes each number absolutely distinctive, and the best numbers get more imaginative as they go along. The choreography is a many-layered candy box designed to give maximum pleasure to the audience’s palette. I generally complain at a contemporary musical that there are too damn many numbers; this one has nearly thirty, and I couldn’t get enough of them. Of course, it helps that they include songs like “It Don’t Mean a Thing,” “Black and Blue” and “I Double Dare You” – and that the orchestrations and arrangements are the work of that wunderkind Branford Marsalis.

James Monroe Iglehart does what amounts to a sharply etched impersonation of Satchmo; I’m not sure what else a musical-theatre performer could do with a personality whose every attribute is so celebrated. It’s Gavin Gregory as King Oliver, the bandleader who was Armstrong’s great mentor (and whose life ended tragically), who’s the real sparkplug in this production. He bows out for most of act two, but then Lincoln Perry, a.k.a. Stepin Fetchit, appears when Pops makes it to Hollywood, and he turns out to be a role for a tap dancer: the formidable DeWitt Fleming Jr., who leads the most dazzling number of the evening, “When You’re Smiling.” Renell Taylor contributes some spectacular soft shoe in “Up a Lazy River.” Louis has four wives, each played by a magnificent singer – Dionne Figgins as Daisy Parker, Jennie Harney-Fleming as Lil Hardin, Kim Exum as Alpha Smith and Darlesia Cearcy as Lucille Wilson – whose style is distinct from that of each of the other three. The eleven o’clock number is, as one might have hoped, “Hello, Dolly!,” and the finale is, of course, “A Wonderful World,” but between those two the four leading women perform “St. James Infirmary” as a quartet. Whoever came up with that idea – perhaps Andrew Delaplaine and Renshaw, who are credited with conceiving the show, or Daryl Waters, who supervised the music, or Marsalis – deserves a special bow.

– Steve Vineberg is Distinguished Professor of the Arts and Humanities at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he teaches theatre and film. He also writes for The Threepenny Review and is the author of three books: Method Actors: Three Generations of an American Acting Style; No Surprises, Please: Movies in the Reagan Decade; and High Comedy in American Movies.