Helen Shaw
Staff writer
If you’re going to find pleasure in New York in the middle of a heat (and news) wave, you’ll need three things: loose clothing, ice cream, and the lightest of light comedies, preferably something so buoyant that it keeps your mind floating serenely above the humidity. Sweetness, silliness, and things that barely touch the skin—those are the key. It’s handy, therefore, that, starting July 31, a sorbet-colored Encores! revival of “Once Upon a Mattress,” the oddball, quasi-medieval musical frolic, from 1959, transfers over from City Center to the Hudson Theatre, on Broadway.
Amy Sherman-Palladino has adapted the book for the Broadway run; the original, a reimagined version of the princess and the pea, was written by Marshall Barer, Jay Thompson, and Dean Fuller, with lyrics by Barer and music by Mary Rodgers, the daughter of the legendary Richard. An early version of “Mattress” was knocked together by this group to serve as an entertainment at Camp Tamiment, a sort of summer camp for grownups in the Poconos, and you can still smell the late nights and campfire in its scenes. (For more of that marvellous mid-century gossip-and-woodsmoke flavor, listen to the audiobook of Mary Rodgers’s autobiography “Shy,” written with Jesse Green and read aloud by Christine Baranski.)
“Mattress” is pure let’s-be-kids nonsense, with a soupçon of sex comedy: a castle is surprised when Winnifred the Woebegone—a hard-charging, beer-chugging, swamp-dwelling princess—clambers out of its moat to woo its bashful prince, Dauntless. The first Winnifred was Carol Burnett, and here Sutton Foster galumphs gleefully into Burnett’s footsteps: Foster is a vaudevillian and a champion ham, and “Mattress” lets her lean into the thousand possibilities of her rubber bones. (Michael Urie is her Dauntless, and he manages to be both wide-eyed straight man and melting ingénue at once.) Lear deBessonet, who also directed the Encores!-to-Broadway production of “Into the Woods,” in 2022, again imports the revival series’ stripped-down, concert-style fleetness. It’s the right meal for summer: eat and eat, you’ll still leave lighter than you went in.
About Town
Dance
Since 2021, five of New York City’s top dance companies—New York City Ballet, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre, American Ballet Theatre, Dance Theatre of Harlem, and Ballet Hispánico—have joined forces for the BAAND Together Dance Festival, at Lincoln Center. The best selections on this year’s sampler, performed indoors this time, are George Balanchine’s intimate and haunting “Duo Concertant” and William Forsythe’s spiky “Blake Works IV,” which the Harlem dancers turn into sexy fun. Also on the program: Hans Van Manen’s “Solo” (which is actually a trio) and Annabelle Lopez Ochoa’s “Sombrerísimo.”—Brian Seibert (David H. Koch Theatre; July 30-Aug. 3.)
Off Broadway
Beckett breeds strange fanboys. One is Bill Irwin, an actor and a clown who created “On Beckett,” a one-man show, from 2018, about the “famous Irish writer of famously difficult writings,” now lovingly revived. The solo format befits Beckett, renowned for his exploration of human interiority and isolation. Irwin, however—amid selections from “Waiting for Godot” and from lesser-known works such as “Texts for Nothing”—argues that underlying the alienation is a desire for meaning and connection. He makes a convincing case, bringing such extraordinary physicality to Beckett’s words that the texts draw you in, despite their abstruseness. If Irwin’s charm doesn’t always keep tedium at bay, consider it a reminder of our ongoing struggle for fulfillment in an indifferent universe.—Dan Stahl (Irish Rep; through Aug. 5.)
Hip-Hop
Few musicians have been more multimedia savvy than Missy Elliott. At the turn of the millennium, the visionary Virginia rapper helped advance hip-hop forms with a future-funk sound and a freaky, animated stylistic identity, all powered by a wild and uncanny imagination. Across her four best albums, from the 1997 classic “Supa Dupa Fly” to “Under Construction” (2002), Elliott was constantly shifting, working alongside the producer Timbaland and the video directors Hype Williams and Dave Meyers, and sustained through the mid-two-thousands by flamboyant performances. She packs all of that audiovisual history into the “Out of This World” tour, her first billing as a solo headliner, supported by fixtures from throughout her career—Timbaland, the R. & B. singer Ciara, and the like-minded eccentric Busta Rhymes.—Sheldon Pearce (UBS Arena; Aug. 3.)
Classical