Once Upon a Mattress | 2hrs 15mins. One intermission. | New York City Center | 131 West 55th Street | 212-581-1212

After suffering through Once Upon a One More Time last summer, I concluded that musicals about princesses had become a royal bore; no more singing and dancing tiaras for me, please. And yet Sutton Foster’s full-body comic onslaught as Winnifred the Woebegone in Once Upon a Mattress has restored my fealty to throne. Playing her first stage princess since the ogre-besotted Fiona in 2008’s Shrek, Foster musters every talented inch of her limber frame, rubber face, and iron lungs to generate waves of zany ecstasy in this delightful concert version for City Center Encores!

An urbane riff on Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Princess and the Pea,” Mattress was an early pioneer of the musical fractured fairytale in 1959, decades before composer Mary Rodgers’ lifelong buddy Stephen Sondheim had a go at the Grimms with Into the Woods. Not so coincidentally, the production is helmed by Encores! artistic director Lear de........

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