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Sutton Foster Brings Some Bounce to Once Upon a Mattress
Working off a book freshened up by Amy Sherman-Palladino, the actress gives it her all in this transfer of an Encores! production.
Although the show is staged all the time at the drama-club level — because it’s funny and goofy, colorful and slapsticky, with a fairy-tale story and a solid number of parts to distribute among the 11th-graders — it’s not so often produced in big, professional settings. Burnett would belt and honk and sling herself around the stage, playing Winnifred too loud and too broad and therefore exactly right; Parker, regardless of her comedy skills, is not the same kind of physically robust, almost circusy performer, and that revealed the show’s weaknesses. The crisp patter that works so well in the mouths of Rory and Lorelai Gilmore, I thought, might land the way it does when a middle-aged English teacher tries to describe Iago as “sus.” As it turns out, I had it backward.
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