What's the Funniest Fruit?
Hint: you can stuff your cheeks with it.
Sutton Foster can do no wrong. In my family, she’s in the same privileged category as Julia Roberts and my first-grade teacher: luminous, life-changing figures with killer smiles.
It’d be difficult to follow musical theater in the last 20 years and avoid Foster’s rippling vocals on cast recordings of “Anything Goes” and “Thoroughly Modern Millie.” The two-time Tony Award winner is a consummate performer: she taps, she sings brassily or sweetly, she flashes a grin to win every heart. She’s a ball of energy, a piston, a winking authority with personality in every finger flick. There’s never laziness to her performances, no cutting corners. Her stagewomanship feels refreshing but also reminiscent of Broadway’s bygone days.
The other week, I got to see Foster star in an Encores! production of “Once Upon a Mattress” at Manhattan’s City Center. I’d never seen the musical before, and it wasn’t my favorite –– I’m not sure if I’ll ever get behind the whole medieval-setting-with-1950s-ditties combo. But to see Foster light up a stage is always a treat, and she was as bright as ever.
She starred as Princess Winnifred, a mangy swamp maiden competing for the hand of one remarkably flaccid prince in this take on The Princess and the Pea. Having swum the moat and scaled the castle wall, she arrives onstage in a pair of drooping pantaloons. She spends her first 10 or so minutes of stage time extracting fake animals from her back, hair, and nether regions. Just when she’s rid herself of the leeches between her shoulder blades, she tears a muskrat from the rear of her wig. She convulses in full-body spasms between each extraction, shaking and scratching like a junkyard dog. The pantaloons prove accommodating; later, she whips a string of crabs from her crotch.
There’s something genuinely thrilling about this kind of live physical comedy. It’s a similar thrill to seeing actors catch batons in the middle of a dance number –– the breath-bating spectacle of real-time performance. Milking every silly gesture, Foster had the audience cackling, from the Tic Tac–popping septuagenarians to the four year old in a tiny plaid suit. (A seasoned patron of the arts, he knew the musical well enough to call out the names of songs from the first chords.)
Looking chaotic on stage takes careful choreography. I appreciated the artistry behind every intense wriggle and pronounced grimace. After her arrival, Foster’s character (who goes by Fred) retires to the bed chamber where she’ll be staying. She’s overcome by the luxuries of the castle, including a bowl of green grapes resting on a table. The audience watches in hysterics as she individually stuffs the grapes into her mouth until her cheeks are bulging with them. Just when you think she can’t fit any more, she lodges another under her lip, cranks her jaw a tad wider.
Foster’s bits of extreme physical comedy knock the dust off a dated script. Her total commitment to the humor is exhilarating, not to mention impressive –– she’s about to belt a solo in a few beats. Just in time, she regurgitates the grapes into a bowl, an action she later repeats after taking a bite out of a soap bar. Her crumbly mastication is its own delight.
If Foster’s antics feel fresh it’s because she’s tapping into an evergreen comedic tradition. Her stunts are not anachronistic for a ’50s script; they bring to mind another member of my personal hall of fame (and my third-grade Halloween costume), Lucille Ball.
On I Love Lucy, Ball proved just how funny a person could be. When is it not hilarious to see someone stuff their face with chocolates, or their bra for that matter? She took basic acts of bodily humor and spun them into implausible scenarios: for instance, lighting her fake nose on fire when trying to disguise herself from the actor Bill Holden. It takes dexterity to curl your lip in the perfect sneer or shuffle out of a meat freezer like a human icicle. With physical comedy, the stakes are high: there’s the potential for hilarity but also for soul-crushing embarrassment.
Like Foster, Ball was built like a show girl and elegant like a leading lady. But she found her stride in mess, hiding eggs in her shirt while dancing the tango or wrestling an Italian woman in a vat of grapes. She did the latter in another pair of pantaloons, a perfect clothing choice for barefoot comedy. As it turns out, the grape (not the banana!) is the funniest fruit.
Foster’s performance made me want to revisit my favorite I Love Lucy episodes (I also felt the “spunk” of Mary Tyler Moore in her beaming presence). It got me excited to see what she’ll do with the role of Mrs. Lovett in the newly cast production of “Sweeney Todd.” I’m hoping for more onstage eating (meat pies might get messier than grapes), before she inevitably brings me to tears when singing “Not While I’m Around.”