Once Upon A Mattress
Landor Theatre Spring 2003

This South London pub theatre has a history of taking on Broadway musicals you would expect to be too big and ambitious for them, and pulling them off. And now, with the first London revival of this 1959 hit, they've done it again. There is more life, more spirit, more fun to be had in this pocket theatre than in most of the moribund megamusicals that have passed through the West End in recent years.

Once Upon A Mattress is an old-fashioned Broadway musical, from the days when all (All!) you needed were some good songs, a witty book and roles tailored to show off the performers at their best. None of its creators - music by Mary Rodgers, lyrics by Marshall Barer, book by Barer, Jay Thompson and Dean Fuller - became major names, though all had full careers, but they came together at just the right time to produce a real charmer.

The score is the kind of solid pop music that even second-string Broadway writers used to turn out as a matter of course, and although I hadn't seen the show in over 40 years, I could have sung every one of the songs going in. Rodgers (daughter of the more famous Richard) has some really lovely melodies for In A Little While, Normandy, and Yesterday I Loved You, while Barer's lyrics anticipate Sondheim in their cleverness - "Alack, a lass is what we lack/We lack a lass, alas alack" and "My time is at a premium/For soon the world will see me a/Maternal bride-to-be."

The plot, a take-off on the story of the princess and the pea, is built on the central joke that the heroine is no fairy tale princess, but a brassy, unfeminine goofball who is exactly what the sleepy little fairy tale kingdom needs to shake it up. It was originally a vehicle for the young Carol Burnett, who played Winnifred the Woebegone as gawky country mouse, arms and legs shooting off in various directions, horseface emitting the oddest-sounding and yet somehow melodic bleats.

In this delightful revival diminutive Donna Steele comes at the role from another angle, and is just as successful. Her Winnifred is an escapee from New Jersey or one of New York's outer boroughs, a working-class ethnic several social classes out of her league - think Fran Drescher or any of the women from The Sopranos - but with more healthy energy than anyone else around. When she lets loose with the Princess's brassy anthem, I've Always Been Shy, you can sense the dust and cobwebs being shaken loose from the rafters.

She gets strong support from Alistair Munro and Justine Balmer as the secondary romantic couple, William Maidwell as the mama's boy prince, Dian Perry as his wicked-witch-like mother, and a uniformly attractive and talented cast, several of whom double on musical instruments when not (and sometimes while) acting, singing and dancing. Director Robert McWhir and musical stager Christopher Stewart keep the whole thing flowing smoothly without ever taking the show or themselves too seriously.

Yes, the sets and costumes have the amiable tattiness reminiscent of school productions, and occasionally the acting or singing are a bit too big for the small space. But the not-very-long Underground ride to this not-too-familiar part of Lambeth is well worth it for an evening that will send you out in a humming and happy mood.

Gerald Berkowitz

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Review - Once Upon a Mattress - Landor 2003