It has a laugh-filled script with an amusing score as well.

But has there ever been an Overture that more misrepresents the musical that the audience will see?

The one for ONCE UPON A MATTRESS features an inordinate number of ballads that are sung by secondary characters. They don’t suggest that this is a musical comedy that offers hilarity.

An ideal Overture for this show would let theatergoers hear perky songs that would preview their delight when the curtain rises on this most amusing production and its hilarious leading lady.

Granted, the first 20 seconds of that Overture does offer the comic song that the hapless Prince Dauntless will enthusiastically sing in due time. But after that comes “Normandy,” which will soon be sung by Lady Larken. She’s an unmarried but expectant mother who’s leaving a medieval kingdom in hopes of finding a better life

That’s followed by “In a Little While,” the first song that, in happier times, Larken had sung with her beau Sir Harry. After that comes “Yesterday I Loved You,” the couple’s final song of reconciliation.

According to the original cast album, we’re now at the 3:19 mark, where we’ve had 65 straight seconds of softer sounds. Finally, we hear the melody to which our gawky-but-glorious heroine, Princess Winifred the Woebegone, will soon sing: “Shy.”

But six measures is all we get of it, and then we’re onto “Many Moons Ago,” the show’s opener – which is yet another ballad.

True, it only lasts a dozen seconds before giving equal (and short-shrifted) time in reprising the Prince’s happy-go-lucky number before the Overture ends.

Did composer Mary Rodgers and lyricist Marshall Barer think that showcasing ballads might landthem some cover recordings? “In a Little While” even gets a reprise, which in 1959 meant “Pop singers, this is the song you should record.”

If that had been the songwriters’ plan, it failed. In an article that Barer wrote many years later for Scholastic Magazine, he had to admit that not a single song from MATTRESS was ever recorded by anyone aside from those on cast albums.

Certainly, Princess Winifred’s big numbers – “Shy” and “Happily Ever After” – are character songs that would never be out-of-the-show hits, but, oh, do they score in the musical. For the former, Barer got in two great puns; for the latter, some dazzling internal rhymes that challenge an audience to keep up and catch every clever syllable.

Carol Burnett originally had the role that jump-started her on the road to superstardom. Since then, thousands of other performers have played Winifred; professionally speaking, Jane Connell (MAME’s original Gooch), Sarah Jessica Parker (in her pre-SEX AND THE CITY days) and Tracy Ullman (in a Disney version) have all portrayed this oaf-like, unfeminine but lovable princess who travels long and hard while “fishing for a mate with bated breath and hook.”

(Get it?)

Here Sutton Foster plays the princess after the prince’s heart (which isn’t hard to get; his mother is the problem. Foster semi-resembles Burnett and occasionally brings her to mind. But she isn’t doing a mere imitation.

After Foster was cast in the City Center Encores! airing this spring, many opined that she would be too old for the role. Burnett was 26 when she opened the show; Foster isn’t all that far from being twice that age.

And that’s where Foster gives credence to the oft-heard expression that age is just a number. So is two – the number of Tonys Foster has. So is three – the number of Tonys that Foster might have by this time next year.

She has comic timing that would start a clock – even a broken one. Her voice is strong, and she can even let out a fine operetta trill when Rodgers’ music calls for it. In “Shy,” she holds a note long enough to get the audience applauding.

You’re saying, “Oh, today’s audiences almost always get their hands clapping to award such vocal pyrotechnics.” Yes, but as soon as Foster hears the applause, she immediately returns to the body of the song. The long-held note is part of the character as a humorous way of revealing that Winifred isn’t aware that she’s hardly shy. That’s all what Foster wants to convey.

Along the way, Foster breaks the fourth wall in most unexpected ways, and marvelously maneuvers an eating scene that may be more intense than the one Harpo Marx did in ROOM SERVICE or Dolly Levi displayed at the Harmonia Gardens. When she dances, she’s able to lift her leg high and straight enough to make it parallel to the stage. Not since Charlotte Greenwood has anyone done this as well.

(Don’t know Greenwood? Check her out in “The Farmer and the Cowman” in the film of OKLAHOMA! Go ahead. It won’t kill you.)

Foster does succumb to a trite bit where she pretends to be so amused by something that’s just happened on stage that she – not Winifred, mind you, but Foster herself – starts to smile and suppress a laugh. She only does it for a mini-second, almost-but-not-quite imperceptibly, but reveals enough for the audience to catch it.

Is this I’m-losing-it look Foster’s homage to Burnett, whose TV repertory company became known for it? True theater aficionados despise such phoniness, but audiences always love to peel away a character and find the performer underneath. So did this one.

The libretto by Barer, Jay Thompson and Dean Fuller establishes that Winifred entered the kingdom by swimming through the castle’s moat. Winifreds up to now have just entered soaking wet, but here director Lear deBessonet and book massager Amy Sherman-Palladino remind us of what a person would truly look like if she had braved murky waters. Beauty may only be skin-deep, but Winifred’s skin is caked with enough dirt to suggest she’s Miss Wrath of God 1428. The famous and accurate expression that “You neverget a second chance to make a first impression” certainly comes to mind.

That impression does not endear her to Queen Aggravain who really is the Wrath of God. AnaGasteyer is an excellent haughty harridan who’s infantilized her song (“Drink your cocoa!”) and sabotages each young miss who tries to become his bride.

(Interesting: MATTRESS debuted the same month as GYPSY. Has any ten-day span ever given Broadway two more difficult musical theater mothers?)

As the pathetic prince, Michael Urie is a terrific man-child (with an emphasis on the latter). Costume designer Andrea Hood puts him in an outfit that features much baby blue, which accurately comments on who he is. And yet, Urie nicely calibrates a some slow-but-sure indications that he may one day break out of his hell.

Lady Larken follows in the great tradition of female characters in musicals who are smarter than their male counterparts: Ado Annie in OKLAHOMA!, Babe in THE PAJAMA GAMEand the aforementioned Dolly. Nikki Rene Daniels’ admirably shows the brains and backbonedenied Sir Harry (an appropriately clueless Will Chase).

Brooks Ashmanskas deftly plays a Wizard who is about as competent as the one we met in Oz. We learn that right away from the air-quotation marks that The Jester (an amusing Daniel Breaker) makes before he says the word “wizard.”

Aren’t air-quotation marks an anachronism for a show that takes place in the 15th century? It’s one of many such non-poetic licenses that our director and adapter have taken. If such Flintstones-type humor strikes you as a dim-witted way to get laughs, prepare to roll your eyes repeatedly. A deodorant spray can makes an appearance, and the would-be contenders for Dauntless’ hand each carries an 8-by-10 glossy that even sports a page of credits on the back.

Choreographer Lorin Latarro does fine but not flawless work. For one thing, she should have made sure everyone was facing front to deliver one of Barer’s best jokes. Considering that there’s the very strange law in the land that no one can marry until Prince Dauntless does, the frustrated townspeople complain that “Nobody’s getting any.”

Isn’t that too ribald for a fairy tale that up to now has seemed G-rated? But Barer shows us that we’re the ones who jumped to salacious conclusions. Give them time, and the citizens will actually complain that “Nobody’s getting any younger.” Latarro should stage the moment so the audience can get an extra laugh.

Then there’s the way Latarro handles “Very Soft Shoes,” The Jester’s song (which has another great Barer gag about where the fool’s father went to work each day). Very soft shoes refers to what jesters have long been shown to wear on their feet, but Latarro is content to have The Jester and his backup dancers wear very hard shoes.

Mary Rodgers will never be confused with Richard Rodgers, but on the last syllable of “Opening for a Princess,” she did replicate one of her daddy’s favorite specialties: the “wrong note” meaning the flattened note that actually sounds more arresting to the ear than if the note had not been flattened in the first place.

Sherman-Palladino and deBessonet and have included some sight gags that may, depending on who you are, make you laugh out loud or gross you out. Give credit to the new librettist in replacing topical references that haven’t passed the test of 65 years ago with ones just as good.

Who’s responsible for improving the scene in which Aggravain’s whipped husband, King Septimus the Silent (David Patrick Kelly), uses charades to teach his son The Facts of Life? Now The King draws some diagrams on the floor that better help the innocent prince to understand.

Septimus is only Silent until the end of the show, where he finally gets the chance to say two lines that always guaranteed to get laughs and applause. That’s exactly what Kelly got on the first one.

Alas, he didn’t wait for the audience to stop responding before delivering the second, which is a shame, for it’s a line that easily tops the first one. So, the crowd missed one of the best jokes in the show.

As was the case with INTO THE WOODS, FINIAN’S RAINBOW, THE APPLE TREE and of course CHICAGO, MATTRESS is a production that originated at Encores! and then moved to Broadway. That always means that the sets are modest to the point where charging Broadway prices is decidedly immodest.

Yet there is one benefit to any Encores! production that comes to Broadway. With the orchestra onstage taking up a good deal of it, the action and the actors must play close to the lip of the stage. That’s always a good place for comedy, especially when the lighting is nice and bright.

(Justin Townsend’s is.)

As hilarious as MATTRESS is, you may very well find that at your performance that you’ll be treated to a few extra laughs that aren’t in the production. That can happen at a family show to which parents bring their children. So, after a joke has landed with the adults and everyone is ready to move on, you may hear a sweet little laugh from a little boy or little girl who needed an extra second or two to catch up with the joke.

And that makes the audience laugh yet again. No question that ONCE UPON A MATTRESS is for children and adults of all ages. But don’t be broken-hearted if you arrive late and miss the Overture.