How Cole Escola Made ‘Oh, Mary!’ Broadway’s Hottest Summer Show

Mary Todd Lincoln—hoop skirt the size of Texas, a petulant scowl twice as wide, and with ringlets like coiled rats’ tails—is heading to Broadway. In Cole Escola’s ingenious, hilarious, ridiculous, and at moments oddly moving 80-minute play, Oh, Mary!, Abraham Lincoln’s wife, who Escola plays, is imagined as a wannabe cabaret star, thoroughly bored by the Civil War and politics raging around her, unaware of her husband’s other possible sexual exploits, and completely oblivious to anyone else’s feelings. She just wants her own show, dammit.

Fair warning to historians and Lincoln specialists: It is based on no known historical facts, whatsoever.

When Oh, Mary! played at the Lucille Lortel Theatre off-Broadway earlier this year it became an immediate hit, first with queer audiences delighting in its cleverly outrageous ribaldry. Then the straights and celebrities descended. There was so much flouncing-in-bustles and feverishly daft melodramatics on such a tiny stage it was a miracle, and testament to director Sam Pinkleton’s ingenuity, that the excellent cast—including Escola, Conrad Ricamora as “Mary’s husband,” Bianca Leigh as her poor chaperone, and James Scully as her teacher—stayed upright.

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