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[title]In 2011, Amy Sherman-Palladino, the writer-creator of the beloved TV dramedy Gilmore Girls, saw the Broadway revival of Anything Goes starring Sutton Foster and realized she’d found the perfect lead actress for her newest series, Bunheads. That series gained an enthusiastic fanbase, but was short-lived. Sherman-Palladino and Foster’s relationship endured however.
So when Foster signed up to play the gawky but formidable Princess Winnifred, a.k.a. Fred, in a revival of the 1959 musical Once Upon a Mattress—now playing on Broadway at the Hudson Theatre through November 30—who better to give the script a 21st-century spruce-up than Sherman-Palladino, fresh off an award-winning five-season run of her hit series The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel? “The first person I thought of was Amy,” Foster said in an interview on The Broadway Show. “She’s the funniest lady I know—and in many ways, she’s a Fred.”
Though Mattress is 65 years old, Fred was very much ahead of her time: She travels alone from her kingdom, a far-off swampland, and swims through a moat to compete to marry the big-hearted mama’s boy Prince Dauntless (Michael Urie). “I’ve heard all the amazing things about being a bride,” Fred tells everyone at court. “Your life is so different. You get new socks—you can play board games. And you get to climb trees and ride horses and do gymnastics. And you get a pal. Someone who thinks you’re funny and calls you a nickname.”
Those lines are new. What’s not is Fred’s combination of spunk, sass and endearing awkwardness—all signature qualities of Sherman-Palladino’s most memorable female characters, including Lorelai and Rory Gilmore and, more recently, Midge Maisel, the stereotypical 1950s Upper West Side housewife turned unlikely standup comic.
The women in Sherman-Palladino’s version of Mattress are a tad brighter than you may remember. One prospective princess is a medieval-history expert. “Ask me the battle strategy for the War of the Vandals!” she begs. “They drew them into the bog knowing the mosquitos were diseased. It would’ve worked too but they had to wait a month for everyone to die!”
And the men are a little bit dimmer (but lovable). Dashing as he is, Sir Harry (Will Chase) can’t comprehend the idea of Lady Larken (Nikki Renée Daniels) having a baby: “But I thought if you thought of holy things you couldn’t get pregnant,” he blubbers. “And it was a Thursday. You can’t get pregnant on a Thursday.” Larken gazes at her knight and his shiny spurs—boy, he loves those spurs—and sweetly replies, “God you’re—handsome.”
In adjusting the original script of Once Upon a Mattress, Sherman-Palladino has pruned some material that felt dated; Fred no longer advises Larken to “try and act a little helpless—men don’t like girls that are too strong.” But she hasn’t messed with the musical’s fairytale roots; she’s simply broadened the definition of “happily ever after” for all the Freds out there. As she told the Los Angeles Times: “That journey of love and acceptance, of wanting to belong someplace and having someone see you for the greatness that you are, even if you did crawl out of the slime—that’s the princess journey.”
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