New Musical Off Broadway

Once Upon a Mattress (book by Jay Thompson, Marshall Barer, Dean Fuller; music by Mary Rodgers; dances by Joe Layton) is a cocktail-hour version of the children's-hour fairy story, The Princess on the Pea. The princess, as every pre-TV schoolchild recalls, is a lady so sensitive that she can feel a pea through a great thickness of mattresses, thereby passes the test of royalty and may marry the prince. Mattress' bookmakers offer odds that there was more to this yam than met the eye of Hans Christian Andersen. Apart from the boob-catching title, their fanciful inside fairy story is a feather-light blend of innocent merriment and sophisticated bounce.

King Sextimus (Jack Gilford) is a Harpo Marxist mute with whom no 15th century lady in waiting is more than half safe. Queen Agravaine (Jane White) is a jawing virago for whom possession is nine-tenths of motherhood's law. It begins to look as if their son, poor fretful Prince Dauntless (Joe Bova), will always be mama's boy. And then one day Princess Winnifred (Carol Burnett) swims the moat. Winnifred ("My friends call me 'Fred' ") rescues Dauntless from his possessive mother, but only after Fred's friends have built up the queen's under-the-mattress pea with a few extra props (a mandolin, a spiked orb, a lobster).

With her waist-length pigtail, goofy clowning and hillbilly charm, Comedienne Burnett seems to have escaped from a cartoonist's drawing board. Whether she is quaffing one goblet of mead too many, chewing the wax grapes in her corsage and spitting out the seeds, or opening her mouth to grapefruit size to bellow that she's Shy, Actress Burnett makes her musical comedy debut a choicely comic event.

Another of Mattress' promising debutantes: Composer Mary Rodgers, daughter of famed Tunesmith Richard Rodgers. Reminiscent at times, her pleasantly fashioned score is never merely derivative. Veteran Broadway Director George Abbott sets a pace that is nimble without being frantic. Occasionally, Mattress' comic reach exceeds its grasp and good taste e.g., a scene in which the mute king tries to mime the facts of life for his son. But when the evil queen finally brings the fabled pea to her lips in a dice player's frenzied kiss, it is an unconscious reminder of how much of the evening is a delightful streak of playgoing luck.

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