Two predictions. One, that this coming Halloween, theater fans will be hunting for perfect replicas of the dress designed by Holly Pierson that Cole Escola wears as Mary Todd Lincoln in the insanely fun Broadway play Oh, Mary!—a bustling, funereal-black hoop skirt. A vital accessory to ape is their wig of scythe-sharp center parting and ringleted curls, designed by Leah J. Loukas.
Second prediction: that the exasperated question, “Who the fuck is Louise?,” is soon heard ringing through the streets.
Is there a more terrifying gaze to be subjected to than Escola’s Mary, furious at being denied alcohol and the chance to perform her cabaret of “madcap medleys”? There is not. The fury in Escola’s eyes could set aflame ice left for hundreds of years in the coldest icebox on earth.
When her husband, President Abraham Lincoln (Conrad Ricamora), says she cannot perform, given the War against the South, Mary has no idea what he’s talking about. Instead, she asks sneeringly, “South of what?”
The delights of Oh, Mary! (Lyceum Theater, booking to Sept 15) are many, varied, and all-winning. If, like many, the world and life in general has left you tense, this Broadway show—transferred by way of rave reviews and celebrity visitors from an award-laden sold-out run at the Lucille Lortel Theatre downtown—will liberate waves of plentiful laughter from within. In the best way that only theater can, the hilarity is communally shared by your fellow audience members, who are losing it merrily all around you. For 80 minutes, the Lyceum is a rumbling sea of giggling and guffaws.
The show, written by Search Party star Escola and directed by Sam Pinkleton, is based—as Escola recently told The Daily Beast—on no history whatsoever, and is set as the Civil War is winding down. In Escola’s vision, Mary is a frustrated cabaret artiste manqué—bored, petulant, cruel, vicious, an utterly vapid, self-involved alcoholic who drinks her own vomit and enjoys it. Inevitably, we, the audience loves her.
Before she even appears, we can barely wait. “No one is safe while my wife has access to booze. The last time this happened she scaled a clock tower, derailed a freight train, and took a piss all over the senate floor,” Abraham says. “After dealing with my foul and hateful wife all morning a little war might be a breath of fresh air.”
When Escola as Mary materializes, it is in a flurry of rageful malevolence, desperately searching for a bottle of whiskey her husband has hidden from her. She uses everything at her disposal to find its hiding place, and when she does, she conceals it in a pillow. The exchange that follows distils the sharp, silly comedy of the show perfectly.
ABRAHAM: Why are you taking a pillow with you?
MARY: I want to show it to my friends.
ABRAHAM: You don’t have friends.
MARY: I know. I’m hoping to make some. By going into town and showing everyone my amazing pillow.
Given that Abraham and Mary loathe each other with a visceral George and Martha-like intensity, it is also telling that they are perfect, equally strange bedfellows, queer in very different ways.
There’s a wonderful moment when she asks him what matters to her most. “The children?” he says, and they both dissolve into laughter at the shared ridiculous thought of that.
However, the closeted president tells his wife not to tell anyone they fell in love at a cabaret show. “We fell in love at a dance in Illinois. That’s the story!”
The truth, says Lincoln, “makes me look like a– like a–”
“Like a fan of elegant stories told through song?” Mary says. “That’s a wonderful thing to be! We should tell the whole country, “Abraham Lincoln loves cabaret!”
“I had a hold over audiences the likes of which have not been seen since Christ disappeared from behind that stupid rock,” Mary says ever-so-modestly. “My singing, thrilling, my personality, magnetic, my dancing, I made up for that with my singing and personality.”
Escola’s raucous, clever writing—and his matching performance of spoken and physical absurdities, like Mary getting stuck atop a desk—mangles not just history but also language, which in a blink goes from the 19th century to the present day.
“Fucckkk,” Abraham says, as he observes the perfect ass of his innocent-seeming assistant Sam (Tony Macht), who he lasciviously tries to seduce. “Fine, let’s play. You’re at school and you need glasses but your family can’t afford them, lucky for you I’m an optometrist without a conscience.”
The show is played with plenty of winks and in-jokes. Mary’s voice can suddenly deepen, or she may furiously throw herself at a bar shouting the F-word. Indeed, she says that word in the same tone of horniness her husband had when she sees a would-be teacher-lover’s body.
“Perhaps we should get started?” he says to her about their acting lesson. “Knock yourself out, freak,” Mary replies. At various moments we see under her era-specific dress, she is wearing the kind of modern underwear you’d wear to a bachelor party.
Mary’s very specific punching bag is her chaperone Louise (Bianca Leigh), who at first seems to be a simple soul. “Our country is at war! Thousands are being ravaged by typhoid. Your own son perished just last year.”
“It’s no use trying to make me laugh, Louise,” Mary says, before tormenting her over Louise’s liking for the feel of ice cream in a very special, private place. Louise is incredulous that Mary once set fire to her home. Mary shrugs; she put it out eventually. (Louise will have her own, perfectly-lit revenge for all these indignities.)
The staging of the show, which Pinkleton maintains a nimbly clever grip of, is like a cabaret itself, or an overwrought penny dreadful meets pantomime, with gasped declarations, doors wrenched open and closed, and bodies gripped by all kinds of passions, all furnished by Daniel Kluger’s melodramatic music and stage blackouts by lighting designer Cha See. Sometimes no words need to be spoken at all to leave the audience in cackling laughter, such as when Mary promises to not to interrupt Abraham as he speaks, yet every time he opens his mouth to say something she does the same. Their stilted standoff goes on for just the right number of excruciating minutes.
On her journey to becoming a respectable actress (boo!) we see Mary audition, choosing the role of the nurse in Romeo and Juliet for which she confects a Cornish accent, for some reason launching into a reverie about hot seamen before remembering she should be talking about Juliet’s death.
“I right like the smell of balls I do,” Mary says. “But I don’t kiss and tell, I don’t. Not like Juliet, who’s been kissin and tellin and kissin’ some more! She killed herself today. Now I spose it’s up to ol nurse to clean up the mess. Ah well, I still got me mem’ries, I do. Goodnight.”
The producers have asked critics to not mention other key plot points of the show—suffice to say that the introduction of another well-known historical figure, played by James Scully, provides both Mary and Abraham with both romance and sexual passion, yet more betrayal, the audience with more ridiculousness—and American history with another alternative reality.
Beyond its fun, the play is about performance—both on stage, and how we perform and present ourselves; Escola and Scully pare and deconstruct Shakespeare and acting styles with intelligence alongside belly laughs.
The lesson of the show, and it is one the audience cheers loudly, is: what Mary wants Mary gets. And when she—or Escola, or both—looks out at us to note, “we’ve had one hell of a night at the theater, haven’t we?” it feels like we are in two theaters at once, ours and the play’s—especially when Mary adds, “maybe it’s because I can see gay men glaring at me with contempt, but it feels like home.”
This is said as Mary finally performs her much ballyhooed cabaret. At this moment, the stage design by dots has taken us far from the White House and saloon bar to somewhere finally very different and surprising. This is Mary’s crowning moment, but it is one that Escola spikes with perfect mischief, gleeful stupidity, and almost-moving whimsy. Yet it is played enough for real that the resulting cheering, whoops, and applause from the audience would match anything for LuPone or Midler.
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