Well, she certainly passed OUR “sensitivity test.” The adorable, kooky, brave and prodigiously talented triple-threat performer, Sutton Foster, commandeered the barn-like Ahmanson Theatre from a royal roost atop twenty mattresses in Once Upon a Mattress, a vastly entertaining re staging of the goofball classic musical-comedy treatment of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale, “The Princess and the Pea.”
The colorful pageant, which I enjoyed stem to stern, has the two-time Tony Award winning Foster as “Winnifred” (shorted to “Fred”), a tomboyish lass who, when she is not swimming through moats gathering leeches, as she goes, warms, over the course of two acts, to the notion of marriage to a Prince. Once Upon a Mattress, which opened Friday, December 13, will run through the holidays at the Music Center. So go.
Sutton is the show. And she’s not to be missed, with a bracing voice that bounds to the rafters of the Ahmanson (if it had them), but also for her grace (gosh she moves so beautifully and sports a dancer’s slender figure), which she tosses away deliciously in silent physical comedy. An evening spent on her mountain of mattresses, tossing, turning, and twitching, has her survive (a “test” instilled on the sly by the harridan queen, her wicked mother-in-law to be), among other bric-a-brac, a pea planted at bottom of her bed. It’s a masterful hilarious class in insomnia. Hilarious.
And we all know the salient fact — it’s Broadway legend — that the role of Princess Winnifred was originated in the Lower East Side for transfer to the Alvin Theater, November 25, 1959, and then to bounce around a number of Broadway houses to clock 460 performances. And that night, as directed by the stern George Abbott and choreographed by Joe Layton, a star was born. Let’s travel back in time to when critics wielded enormous influence over audiences and the entertainment industry itself. How did Carol Burnett fare with two of the Big Dogs of New York Theater Criticism?
BROOKS ATKINSON, New York Times
Two of the ladies enmeshed in the plot have remarkably fees talent. Mary Rodgers, the composer has written a highly enjoyable score. …She has a style of her own, an inventive mind, and a fund of cheerful melodies; and Once Upon a Mattress is full of good music. Some of it is sung by a breezy comedienne who comes brawling into the story about halfway through the first act and gives it a wonderful lift for the rest of the evening. She is Carol Burnett, a lean, earthy young lady with a metallic voice, an ironic gleam, and an unfailing sense of the comic gesture. As a singer, she discharges Miss Rodger’s music as though she were firing a field mortar…Don’t be distressed by the title, and don’t expect much from the libretto. But be comforted by the fact that the musical theater has acquired a genuine new composer and a funny new clown.
ROBERT COLEMAN, New York Daily Mirror
Carol Burnett made an auspicious bow as the Princess Winifred. She is as pixyish as Alice Pearce and as hoydenish as Betty Hutton. She can belt out a song like Dolores Gray. She can cash in on comedy like Ethel Merman. And yet remain Carol Burnett. A personality in her own right. A future star.
Recommended. Now at the Music Center!
Once Upon a Mattress | Center Theater Group, Ahmanson Theatre | thru Jan 5