Theatre in Review: Once Upon a Mattress (Hudson Theatre)Once Upon a Mattress has landed on Broadway at just the right time -- you could even say in the nick of time. After a spring season of earnest, clenched-jaw musicals populated with juvenile delinquents, tormented artists, dementia cases, and sinister Nazi hordes, someone has sensibly decided a little entertainment is in order. Arriving directly from City Center's Encores! series comes this 1959 fairy-tale spoof, a modest hit originally, that, thanks to a long life in stock and no fewer than three TV adaptations, has had a much longer afterlife than other, bigger hits. At the Hudson, they're throwing a party, and everyone is having a ball. Once Upon a Mattress is, of course, famous for launching the career of Carol Burnett as Princess Winnifred the Woebegone, and it has been catnip for comic actresses of several generations, including Dody Goodman, Imogene Coca, Jo Anne Worley, Andrea Martin, and Lucie Arnaz. More recently, however, suitable Winnifreds have been thin on the ground. A 1996 revival with a cheerful, game Sarah Jessica Parker was a clown show without a clown. In a 2015 Off-Broadway staging, a cast-against-type Jackie Hoffman's acid humor proved incompatible with the role of a boisterous, chaos-causing naif. No such worries apply here. Scaling a castle wall to make her entrance, covered in goodwill and leeches, Sutton Foster is the original bad Cinderella, a straight-talking, moat-swimming vulgarian strong enough to whip her weight in chorus boys. Reaching in her haystack of a hairdo and removing a furry forest creature, rattling the scenery in a number called "Shy," and biting into a cake of soap just for the hell of it, she is, hilariously, closer to a citizen of Dogpatch than a possessor of royal blood. (Explaining her disheveled appearance, she says, "'Caution -- open sewer' means something very different where I'm from.") Placed atop a pile of twenty mattresses and ordered to sleep -- Once Upon a Mattress is a fractured retelling of The Princess and the Pea -- her gymnastic efforts at finding a comfortable spot are worthy of a gold medal in Paris. And. adopting a torch-singer pose for the blues-inflected "Happily Ever After," she tears up the joint, complaining that, unlike her sister heroines Cinderella and Snow White, she has no backup. (Of the latter's dwarves, she notes, enviously, "Practically a regiment!") She even produces an imitation Tarzan yell -- a daring nod to Burnett -- but by then she has more than earned the right. Foster's prime playmate is Michael Urie, as the mother-dominated Prince Dauntless, a prime case of medieval arrested development. ("I'm a grown man now," he bellows in the voice of someone who had to repeat the sixth grade, possibly twice. Unsurprisingly, he bonds instantly with Foster's Winnifred, indulging happily in sassy crosstalk and tickling sessions.) Approaching a climb of perhaps three steps, he stops, assesses the challenge, gets on his knees, and tries to roll upward. And, in the number, "Man to Man Talk," a musical birds-and-bees lecture, his blank, baffled reactions are priceless studies of unassailable innocence. Urie is one of the best clowns at Broadway's disposal and he matches Foster laugh for laugh. Director Lear deBessonet, heavily recasting the production following its Encores! run, has filled this crackpot Camelot with a legion of deft clowns. Taking over for Harriet Harris, Ana Gasteyer's Queen Aggravain is less a frigid Freudian case than a self-adoring Marie Antoinette, but she consistently amuses, whether airily dismissing the latest bunch of pretenders to the throne or donning a pair of glasses to fish that pesky pea out of her bosom. Looking like a paisley-draped pinata in his overly generous flowing gown, Brooks Ashmanskas is the royal wizard, eager to cover up his show business past yet unable to stop himself from coughing up an entire deck of cards if only to prove he can. Daniel Breaker has a sly glint in his eye as the jester/narrator, stopping the second act with the vaudevillian divertissement "Very Soft Shoes." Nikki Renee Daniels charms as the inconveniently pregnant Lady Larken, partnered with Will Chase as her fatheaded knightly swain, deeply enamored of his spurs. As the mute King, David Patrick Kelly offers an advanced course in mime technique, especially when fruitlessly trying to tutor Dauntless in the details of sexual intercourse. Such comedy expertise is desperately needed because Once Upon a Mattress is light, loose-limbed, and with little more than fun on its mind. Indeed, the second act consists of vaudeville routines designed to keep time until the inevitable finale. For this staging, the book, by Jay Thompson, Marshall Barer, and Dean Fuller has been worked over by TV's Amy Sherman-Palladino, yielding mixed results. The decision to eliminate the role of the Minstrel, cutting the number "The Minstrel, the Jester, and I," helps streamline the action. But Sherman-Palladino has seeded the script with gags -- about scrapbooking, trust issues, Greenpoint, and the Glastonbury Festival -- that, jarringly, scream 2024 while doing little to add to the laugh quotient. Mary Rodgers' score, set to Barer's lyrics, recalls her father's work with Lorenz Hart -- think A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court -- rather than his more mature efforts with Oscar Hammerstein II. As such, it is filled with lovely things, not least the ballads "In A Little While" and "Normandy." And her knack for wicked wit masquerading as straight-faced simplicity keeps the tone buoyant. After Mattress and one big failure -- the Judy Holliday vehicle Hot Spot -- the composer retired from the Broadway fray, becoming a prose writer and occasionally contributing numbers to revues. "I had a pleasant talent but not an incredible talent," she once told the New York Times. I'm not so sure about that; the Mattress score stacks up against most Broadway musicals of the period. The production retains the Encores! staging with the orchestra onstage, but the relatively spare design is well-suited to this type of lark. David Zinn adorns the proceedings with banners decorated with images of taxis, donuts, cockroaches, and hot dogs, suggesting that this kingdom is the sixth borough of our fair city. Andrea Hood's costumes have many lightly satirical touches; I especially enjoyed the varsity jackets on the lineup of aspiring princesses. Justin Townsend's lighting is thoroughly efficient, and Kai Harada's crystalline sound design again demonstrates why he is the most accomplished practitioner of his trade on Broadway. And, with a nimble cast elevating the material at every turn, Once Upon a Mattress radiates an infectious sense of fun. It's the kind of holiday every season needs; it's our good luck that it showed up just in time to give the summer a much-needed lift. --David Barbour 
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