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Michael Urie will reprise his role as the pampered Prince Dauntless opposite Sutton Foster's scrappy Princess Winnifred in this summer's Broadway revival of the fairy-tale musical Once Upon a Mattress, the production announced today. The two actors also led the show's brief staged-concert run in City Center's Encores! series earlier this year.
Foster, of course, has been the hardest-working woman on Broadway for decades now, working her way up from teenage Star Search contestant to replacement and chorus roles in the 1990s (including in Grease and Annie) to starring in original musicals in the 2000s (including Thoroughly Modern Millie and Shrek) and working her way through the musical-theater canon in revivals ever since (including Anything Goes, Violet and The Music Man). Urie, meanwhile, has parlayed his early fame on TV's Ugly Betty into a stage career of great variety and charm, whether in Off Broadway showcases like Buyer and Seller and The Government Inspector or in Broadway comedies like Torch Song Trilogy and Grand Horizons.
Once Upon a Mattress, a jaunty riff on Hans Christian Andersen’s "The Princess and the Pea," made its Broadway debut in 1959 with Carol Burnett as Winnifred, and returned in 1996 starring Sarah Jessica Parker. The score, by Mary Rodgers and Marshall Barer, includes such charmers as "Shy" and "Happily Ever After"; for this production, directed by the astute Lear DeBessonet, the show's original book (by Barer, Jay Thompson and Dean Fuller) has been substantially retooled by The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel creator Amy Sherman-Palladino.
The supporting cast of the Encores! version included Foster's Thoroughly Modern Millie costar Harriet Sansom Harris as well as Nikki Renée Daniels, J. Harrison Ghee, Cheyenne Jackson, Francis Jue and David Patrick Kelly; none of them have yet been confirmed for the Broadway transfer.
The limited Broadway engagement of Once Upon a Mattress begins at the Hudson Theatre on July 31 and opens officially on August 12. It is scheduled to run through November 30, at which point it will move to Los Angeles for a monthlong run at the Ahmanson Theatre (from December 10 through January 5). You can buy tickets here.
