'Mattress' squanders a golden pairing
The thought of Tracey Ullman and Carol Burnett getting kooky together is a good thought. They're a pair of hammy actresses who excel at skit work and cynical clowning. Premier variety entertainers, they invariably amuse with their brazen staginess and their precise, but broad, facial expressions.
But the reality of their teaming, in ABC's new version of ''Once Upon a Mattress," isn't a good reality. Indeed, it is a bad reality. The musical, presented as part of ''The Wonderful World of Disney" tomorrow at 7 p.m. on Channel 5, has no magic, no joy, no character. It's a slog across an aggressively happy set that's a clash of Candy Land and ''Laugh-In," with Ullman and Burnett buried under all the colorful blandness. The production doesn't engage the ears, the eyes, or the laugh muscles. It engages only the snooze button.
When it first appeared, ''Once Upon a Mattress" appealed as a cracked fairy tale. An adaptation of ''The Princess and the Pea," the musical was the kind of innocent show that helped to keep local amateur theaters in business. But that was a long time ago, and both the musical theater and our cultural sensibilities have grown more self-aware and layered. Even kids expect a little knowing wit, stylistic sophistication, and plot-building these days. Despite its references to premarital pregnancy, the new version of the happily-ever-after story of a nasty queen and a nutty princess nearly evaporates into pointless 1960s-esque nostalgia. It's stubbornly forgettable, not least of all because of the simplistic choreography.
The story finds Queen Aggravain (Burnett) interviewing possible wives for her son, and failing each of them. With Freudian intensity, she wants Prince Dauntless (Denis O'Hare) to remain single and her own. And with a streak of cruelty, she has decreed that no one else in the kingdom may marry until she finds a fit wife for Dauntless. That means that the neighboring Lady Larken (Zooey Deschanel) may not wed her beloved, Sir Harry (Matthew Morrison), despite the fact that she's pregnant.
As a solution, Sir Harry digs up the zany Princess Winnifred (Ullman), sure that she'll be able to pass the Queen's test, which involves a pea at the bottom of 20 mattresses. If Winnifred is truly ''sensitive," according to the Queen's logic, she will stay awake all night because of the pea and be an appropriate match for Dauntless.
Burnett has a long history with ''Once Upon a Mattress," in which she starred as Princess Winnifred onstage in the late 1950s and then again in two TV productions, in 1964 and 1972. As the queen this time, she has her funny moments, most of them thanks to the way she flaunts her fabulously excessive Bob Mackie costuming. She recalls some of her great parodies from the days of ''The Carol Burnett Show." But, like the rest of the cast, she seems a little too old for her role.
Ullman, too, is as brightly bonkers as always, but a little long in the tooth for this kind of frolic. She's easy to watch here, but too easy to forget.
