She Swam the Moat

Once Upon a Mattress
Broadway Rose Theatre – Tigard, Oregon
Sunday, May 24th, 2026 | 2pm Matinee

Directed by Chan Harris
Music by Mary Rodgers
Lyrics by Marshall Barer
Book by Jay Thompson, Dean Fuller and Marshall Barer
Choreographed by Liberty Dolence
Starring Karin Terry as Princess Winnifred, Sharon Maroney as Queen Aggravain, and Marin Donohue as Lady Larkin

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There is a moment in Once Upon a Mattress when Princess Winnifred casually reveals that she swam the moat to reach the castle, arriving soaked, exhausted, and carrying her wet dress in a wad beneath the horrified gaze of the royal court. The line lands as a joke, but the production understands something deeper beneath it: Winnifred is not funny because she fails to be a princess. She is funny because she refuses to become the kind of princess the kingdom expects.

Broadway Rose Theatre Company’s production leans fully into the musical’s physical absurdity without losing the sincerity underneath it. The castle walls glowed in saturated purples and pinks while the scenic design transformed the stage into a playful storybook kingdom built for chaos: mattresses stacked to impossible heights, hidden corridors, exaggerated entrances, and comic near-disasters unfolding in every direction.

Even before the show began, the set already felt knowingly theatrical — less interested in realism than in inviting the audience into a world where timing, rhythm, and silliness mattered more than refinement.

Broadway Rose Theatre Company trailer for Once Upon a Mattress:

At the center of everything was Karin Terry’s Princess Winnifred, described in the program as their ‘favorite clown princess,’ which proved exactly right. Known throughout the show simply as ‘Fred,’ Terry’s performance understood that Winnifred works best without apology. This was not a polished fairytale heroine descending gracefully into royalty. She sprawled across furniture, spoke with complete sincerity about swamps and mud, hauled herself through court etiquette with increasing exhaustion, and somehow remained emotionally grounded through all of it.

The comedy came not from mocking Winnifred, but from watching the kingdom struggle to comprehend someone so completely comfortable being herself.

One of the production’s funniest sequences emerged from a misunderstanding after Winnifred’s arrival, when Lady Larken (Marin Donohue) mistakes the soaked and disheveled princess for a chambermaid scrubbing the floor. The scene spiraled beautifully into embarrassment, class confusion, and mounting panic, while Winnifred herself remained almost entirely unoffended by the situation. The humor rested less in cruelty than in the rigid assumptions of the court collapsing around her.

By the time the infamous sensitivity test finally arrived — twenty mattresses stacked atop a single pea — the production had already earned its absurdity. Winnifred, physically wrecked from the ordeal, staggered through sleepless delirium while calmly announcing the exact number of sheep she counted overnight — becoming less a parody of femininity than a portrait of survival through stubbornness. The reveal that the mattresses concealed an arsenal of spikes, shields, antlers, and weapons only pushed the comedy further into gleeful theatrical nonsense.

Yet somehow, beneath all the chaos, the show continued returning to something unexpectedly tender. Winnifred never transforms into a more “acceptable” version of herself. The kingdom changes around her instead.

And when the musical finally closes with Winnifred immediately falling asleep the moment the pea is removed, it feels strangely earned: not a fairytale reward for becoming delicate enough, but permission to finally rest after enduring a world that kept insisting she become someone else.

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