This comic and progressive retelling of The Princess and the Pea was designed to make audiences rethink their expectations of fairy tales. Once Upon a Mattress is the story of the brave and strong Princess Winnifred who comes to the rescue of a kingdom in need of a new outlook on love, leadership, and life. In keeping with the original production’s progressive stance on love and gender roles, we created a version of this fairytale for today.

This production was a feminist, queer interpretation of the musical wherein we were entirely loyal to the text while creating a fairy tale fantasia where love is love, the gender binary is deconstructed, and the world is as diverse as our own. In this kingdom, gender does not dictate one’s societal role. Anyone can be a knight, a lady-in-waiting, a jester, or a wizard. This production projected a vision of inclusion that insists that, in order to get the happily-ever-after, we need to create an anti-racist, feminist, queer, anti-ableist, body-positive world. Insisting that the process of creating a feminist story be matched behind the scenes, the production and creative team for Once Upon a Mattress was comprised of female-identifying and gender non-binary individuals.