5 September 2020 Derby Day

[KathyB]

Today is the Kentucky Derby, and this year there will be no longshot with a Sondheim-related name winning because of a disqualification. This year, I couldn't find any connection to SJS through any of the horses' names. This year, there are a lot of things that aren't part of the Derby. But at least they're running it, and I'm still trying to pick the winning horse and doing a lousy job of it.

Let the record reflect that at 11:15 am on the day of the Kentucky Derby, my picks are Authentic and Tiz the Law, for no reason other than they have the two outside posts. (Hey, it sort of worked for the Belmont--I picked the horse that came in second.)

[scenicdesign71]

For some reason today I've been YouTubing both the 1964 and 1972 TV versions of Once Upon A Mattress.

(A quick glimpse of the 2005 remake left the impression that Tracey Ullman, genius though she is, was perhaps too cowed by Carol Burnett's presence to make the role of Princess Winnifred entirely her own.  But, since I've still got Disney+ anyway, I suppose I should watch the whole thing before judging too harshly).

The script has obviously aged, but then I suppose it was always largely a vehicle for the delightful original cast (mostly the same in '64 and '72, with the mildly noteworthy exception of Bernadette Peters's supporting turn in '72).

In 1987 or so, Mattress was the first of a small handful of shows in which I dabbled as a performer, starting at 15 at a drama camp connected to a summer-stock theatre in New Hampshire, and ending (conclusively, one must hope) a decade later at a different summer-stock theatre, also in NH.  (Pure coincidence, along with the fact that I returned for a second consecutive summer at each of these theatres.  Between them, those four summers constitute my entire experience of the state of New Hampshire).  I played the Minstrel, a character cut from all three TV versions -- and, come to think of it, there's a third coincidence: like my final role ten years later, in Jesus Christ Superstar, the Minstrel's vocal range extended frustratingly, embarrassingly just beyond my own.

But that experience, as magical as it was mortifying (could there be an apter milestone of adolescence?), barely occurred to me as I watched those two TV versions for the first time today.  In fact, if that decades-gone summer-theatre production crossed my mind at all, it wasn't the experience of performing that came back to me so much as that of rehearsing and watching the inspired, consummately professional work of our leading ladies: a fabulously witchy Queen Aggravain, and a Winnifred -- the late Kim McGuire, then an Equity Membership Candidate, with John Waters's Cry-Baby a year or two in her future -- who, in her own inimitable way, gave even the magnificent Ms. Burnett a run for her money in terms of sheer irresistible quirkiness and dazzling energy.  (Given that this was my first exposure to the show, it's been hard, ever since, for me not to regard the cutesy winsomeness of most other Winnifreds as pandering at best, or grating at worst; to me, Mattress's charm -- which is fairly slight even under the best of circumstances -- depends, to a not-minor extent, on a central couple whose lack of conventional glamor is total and uncompromising).

Another thing struck me just after watching the 1972 version -- one of those things that I either somehow bizarrely never-quite-realized, or else had forgotten over decades of overfamiliarity: the coy would-be-naughtiness of the show's title.  Like The Pajama Game and probably dozens of lesser examples, Once Upon A Mattress suggests, with a wink at once leering and innocent, rather spicier content than the show actually delivers (although, in its time, I suppose some of Mattress's humor might have been deemed unsuitable for young children, fairytale setting notwithstanding).  In retrospect, this kind of smirky midcentury double-entendre looks like a lost art: fifty years previously, in the early twentieth century (pre-Porter/Coward, say), some might have regarded such suggestiveness as obscene; fifty years later, in the early 21st, it seems altogether quaint.  (Meanwhile, the misguided poster design for the 1996 revival -- roughly halfway between the 1972 broadcast and our current day -- aimed for its own "modern" version of innocently-risqué and landed on clumsily-misleading instead).