Review Round-up: 'Oh, Mary!' Is a Broadway Smash

"Oh, Mary!" looks to be the queer Broadway smash the theater has been waiting for. Following in the steps of Charles Ludlam and Charles Busch, Cole Escola has broken the glass ceiling that has eluded others when they brought their campy plays uptown. But since it premiered earlier this year off-Broadway, Escola's take-off on the life of Mary Todd Lincoln has been a critical darling and an audience favorite. That continued when it moved to Broadway where it is playing to near capacity and receiving unanimous critical praise.

"Oh, Mary!" is set in the weeks before Lincoln was assassinated. Escola, best-known for his ongoing role on the cable comedy series "Difficult People," plays the depressed First Lady who is so caught up in her own mania that she doesn't realize a Civil War is going on. The hit play features Featuring Conrad Ricamora as Mary's Husband, James Scully as Mary's Teacher, Bianca Leigh as Mary's Chaperone, and Tony Macht as Mary's Husband's Assistant, the entire production is directed by Sam Pinkleton. Hannah Solow and Peter Smith complete the cast. Ricamora is best-known for the network series "How to Get Away with Murder" and the film "Fire Island." He recently appeared in the David Byrne musical "Here Lies Love."

Here is a sample of the reviews:

Jesse Green, the New York Times (Critic's Pick)

"'Oh, Mary!' may be silly, campy, even pointless, but "stupid," I think not. Rather, the play, which opened on Thursday at the Lyceum Theater, is one of the best crafted and most exactingly directed Broadway comedies in years. Which is a surprise on many levels, and on each level a gift...

"The totally unserious "Oh, Mary!" ... merely wants you to lose your breath guffawing, especially with a series of switchback shocks at the end, so cleverly conceived and executed they're hilarious...

"You have to admire the glee and cheek with which Escola mauls American history, drawing humor from the collision of high importance and low piffle, puncturing one while elevating the other. You can feel revenge being taken on a world that has consigned queerness to inconsequence, yet also a celebration of the way queerness, in response, has allied itself with undervalued people of all types. That's true of drag artists generally – as a performer, Escola recalls the snappish Everett Quinton physically and the lustrous Charles Busch vocally – but also of the kind of characters they preferentially appropriate from pop culture...

"I know that drag queens are being hounded from children's libraries for the sin of reading with lipstick, and the author of 'Oh, Mary!' would probably be the first to disown its cultural importance. But you could do worse during your summer vacation than spend 80 minutes in a profoundly air-conditioned theater seeing how even stupid comedies can become a kind of school, and community. They inflate our pretension until it, and all of us with it, go pop."

David Rooney, the Hollywood Reporter

"Queer alt-comedy in the vein of 'Oh, Mary!' seldom makes it to Broadway, so the arrival of Cole Escola's downtown theatrical sensation at the Lyceum is cause for Big Gay Jubilation. But if that makes this blissfully absurd rethink of a key moment in American history sound like niche entertainment showing up late for Pride Month, don't be deceived. It's hard to imagine anyone with a sense of humor not joining the infectious laughter sparked by Escola's gut-bustingly funny antics, reimagining Mary Todd Lincoln as an alcoholic cabaret artiste manqué, married to a president struggling to keep the closet door shut...

"The nonbinary actor has said in interviews that since theater wasn't exactly throwing open its doors to them, they decided to write their own vehicle.

"Hence this radically silly farce, which transforms a misunderstood first lady into a magnificent – and monstrous – comic creation while shedding irreverent new light on the man she regrets marrying, who is trying to run the country while doing everything possible to keep her off the booze and out of the spotlight...

"Escola's performance in the title role – costumed primarily in a black taffeta hoop-skirt gown and a ridiculous wig of ringlets topped by a severe bun – is a master class in razor-sharp comic timing, shady double takes and giddy physical comedy...

"The demented reincarnation of the first lady is matched by the outrageous queering of Honest Abe, whose sexuality has often been a subject of historical speculation. His insistence that no one must know the couple met in a cabaret bar where Mary was performing one of her "madcap medleys" says plenty. "I was young and confused," he admits. The president's means of letting off steam with his cadet assistant Simon (Tony Macht) gets more explicit, as do some messy threads left dangling from a previous fling...

"Ricamora is a hoot as Abraham, bellowing with rage, shuddering with disgust or praying to God to help tame his sexual urges, bargaining that he'll give all that up after just one more time...

"Scully also gets some choice moments, particularly once the teacher's identity is revealed, instantly upping the stakes. Leigh and Macht, cleverly double-cast, also fit right into a tight-knit, loony ensemble that honors a rich tradition of gleefully over-the-top alternative New York theater, from Charles Ludlam to Charles Busch. There's even a trace of the repertory company spirit of 'The Carol Burnett Show,' although the material's exuberant profanity would have made network execs' heads explode."

Chris Jones, the Daily News

"Sure, a top ticket price of $300 is pushing it – Heavens to Mary, these crazy Broadway prices! – for a show with an 80-minute runtime, an intentionally cheesy set and a cast of five. At times, it feels like you are watching an extended "Saturday Night Live" sketch making campy hay by deconstructing early U.S. history and imagining the battles of a closeted gay Abe (not so much of a stretch) and his unhinged spouse (no stretch at all).

"But if you spend your entertainment dollar purely on the basis of laughs per minute, this show's a bargain, given how many howlers roll out from the stage. The laughs are like Union soldiers crossing a hill in Gettysburg. Abe and Mary are part Rhett Butler and Scarlett O'Hara, part George and Martha, part the old vaudevillians George Burns and Gracie Allen, all running together pell-mell toward the Copacabana.

"Between the clever plot points (which I won't ruin here in any detail), I started musing on what Mary Todd Lincoln would actually have thought of this posthumous treatment. On thing is for sure. We can guess almost nothing about the trajectory of the world after our deaths.

"I'll say this, though, Escola has arrived at exactly the right moment."

Sara Holdren, Vulture

"The most controversial cabaret in town might be happening at the August Wilson Theatre, but the best one is at the Lyceum. There, Cole Escola's riotous, extremely faux-historical farce, 'Oh, Mary!,' has begun its Broadway run, and long may it reign...

"Really, far more than enough – 'Oh, Mary!' is hilarious and, underneath the mayhem, both structurally rock solid and sneakily moving. It may be playing the palace now, but it's confident enough in its own skin to have resisted any sort of unnecessary makeover...

"Escola, as both writer and actor, is the kind of utterly alert, funny-to-the-fingertips comic savant who probably took exactly the right length of beats before coming out of their mother's womb...

"Among 'Oh, Mary!'s' triumphs, though, is that the production isn't simply the Cole Escola Show. Pinkleton's direction is unflaggingly madcap – like the bus in Speed, it never drops below 50 miles per hour (really, more like 70). And while the cast spends quite a bit of the show's 90 minutes shouting, we never tire of the cranked-up volume or the fever pitch. There's an appreciation for melodrama of all modes and eras – from Boucicault to Charles Busch to Liza Minnelli – built into the material, and Escola isn't the only one with a knack for it. Leigh is a hoot as the prim, flouncing Louise, who harbors a dirty little secret involving ice cream; Tony Macht is completely dear in the show's most innocent role, a diligent young soldier named Simon with a crush on mad Mary; and James Scully goes from very good in his scenes as Mary's hot drama teacher to straight-up brilliant when the plot twists him into the position of psycho ex-boyfriend. Meanwhile, Conrad Ricamora's maniacal, hopelessly conflicted Abraham Lincoln has only gotten sharper and more released since I saw the show downtown. Crucially, though he rails at Mary and hides her booze; brutally laments their marriage; and plots to subdue, humiliate, and even institutionalize her, he is not solely her enemy. What he is, really, is a fellow sufferer whose violent denial of self has led him into hell."

Adam Feldman, Time Out, New York

"Cole Escola's 'Oh, Mary!' is not just funny: It is dizzyingly, breathtakingly funny, the kind of funny that ambushes your body into uncontained laughter. Stage comedies have become an endangered species in recent decades, and when they do pop up they tend to be the kind of funny that evokes smirks, chuckles or wry smiles of recognition. Not so here: I can't remember the last time I saw a play that made me laugh, helplessly and loudly, as much as 'Oh, Mary!' did–and my reaction was shared by the rest of the audience, which burst into applause at the end of every scene. Fasten your seatbelts: This 80-minute show is a fast and wild joy ride...

"Mary's intensely mercurial nature–her mood can swing in an instant from savage to sentimental–is an ideal match for Escola's magnetic combination of zaniness and poise, of knowing distance and total moment-to-moment commitment. Their sensibility is steeped in the camp culture of yesteryear, including the works of Charles Ludlam and Charles Busch, but it doesn't stay immersed; a mischievous modern streak continually pokes through the surface. The effect is bewitching: Escola lights up the stage like a full moon..."

"But other than that Mrs. Lincoln, how is the play? Happily, it's a transhistorical delight: a very 21st-century comedy about a 19th-century tragedy as filtered through a lens of 20th-century movie dramas. Director Sam Pinkleton never lets the comic energy flag, and the supporting cast is delicious."

Christian Holub, Entertainment Weekly

"'Oh, Mary!' is laugh-out-loud funny from the first moments; though much of the humor comes from Escola's unbelievable delivery and the slapstick combination of actors on stage. But what makes 'Oh, Mary!' such a fulfilling theatrical experience is that it also has a real message about the dangers of repression, both societal and personal. Letting people express themselves and live their truth may not solve every political problem, but it can certainly make life way more fun. Escola's doing that, and the rest of us should too. Grade: A-

Adrian Horton, The Guardian

The real Mary Todd Lincoln was, by most accounts, erratic, often bedridden by sadness and prone to lavish spending. Not exactly a comic figure, though in the hands of the inimitable Cole Escola, the former first lady is the buzziest, and funniest, theater draw this summer. The comedian's show 'Oh, Mary!,' which transferred to Broadway after critical raves and a twice-extended Off-Broadway run, takes the public blank slate of Abraham's hoop-skirted wife as a launchpad for 80 minutes of irreverent, raunchy, gleefully deranged revisionist history.

Escola, a longtime cult fixture of New York's alt-comedy scene perhaps best known for memorable guest spots on 'Search Party,' 'Difficult People' and 'The Girls on the Bus,' first conceived of this factually askew and gloriously deranged account of Mary's miserable life in 2009 with an email to themselves that simply wondered: "What if Abe's assassination wasn't such a bad thing for Mary?" By their own admission, they did little to no follow-up research. Their Mary Todd is, like her historical counterpart, melodramatic and married to a president named Abraham ('Fire Island's' Conrad Ricamora, perfectly pitiable though at times too shrill in an otherwise resplendently loud play). She's also an incorrigible drunk, a feisty thorn in her husband's side, a nasty piece of work, a self-proclaimed "rather well-known niche cabaret legend" and a total hoot."

Greg Evans, Deadline

"There's funny, there's very funny, and then there's 'Oh, Mary!,' Cole Escola's riotous new comedy that brings more laughs to Broadway than all the 'Gutenberg!s,' Edelmans and Birbiglias combined. You can throw in 'Shucked' for good measure...

"Following its acclaimed and sold-out Off Broadway engagement at the Lucille Lortel Theatre, 'Oh, Mary!,' directed by Sam Pinkleton without so much as a split second wasted, arrives on Broadway with its fearless queerness and brash vulgarity fully intact. Yes, this 80-minute, low-tech production carries Broadway ticket prices, but that fact should stick in the craw only until its dislodged by the first guffaw."

Robert Hofler, The Wrap

"July 11, 2024 goes down as a historic night on Broadway.
"'Oh, Mary!' opened Thursday at the Lyceum Theatre after a successful run Off Broadway, and Cole Escola, the show's author and star, achieves what such crossdressing trailblazers as Charles Ludlam and Charles Busch were never allowed to do...

"'Oh, Mary!' plays even better on Broadway than it did downtown at the Lucille Lortel Theater earlier this year. Experiencing this comedy with a few hundred more theatergoers takes the laughter from boisterous to atomic and the effect is absolutely radioactive. Plot-wise, it continues to be best to write as little as possible. There are outrageous twists and turns in the story that genuinely shock an audience into delayed convulsions of laughter. Let's just say that Escola has somehow managed to turn the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln into an inspired, rollicking comedy.

"In the world of camp, heterosexuality is the biggest joke of all. Except in 'Oh, Mary!' This play lampoons gay sex even more than the straight variety. On any other stage, Escola's Mary would steal the show, but fellow actors Conrad Ricamora and James Scully often snatch it right back. The show's funniest scene (arguably) belongs not to Escola but Ricamora ("Mary's husband") and Scully ("Mary's teacher") when they launch into a dish session that roasts poor Mary alive.

"Bianca Leigh and Tony Macht round out the terrific cast, which Sam Pinkleton directs with all the subtlety of a wild man wielding a buzzsaw."

Johnny Oleksinski, the New York Post

"The preposterously enjoyable Oh, Mary!,' which opened Thursday night at the Lyceum Theatre, does the impossible – thanks to the irrepressible comic genius of playwright and actor Cole Escola..."

"What elevates 'Oh, Mary!' from a hilarious and raunchy skit to an unexpectedly juicy yarn, though, is Escola's oddly suspenseful plot. Multiple revelations get shocked gasps in this laugh-riot about that ol' boozehound Mary Todd Lincoln.

Adding to our satisfaction is that the tremendous cast never winks or acknowledges the ridiculousness of what's in front of us. They treat their characters with the utmost seriousness...

"Director Sam Pinkleton, known mostly as a choreographer, nails the physical comedy as you'd expect a dancer would. But, more importantly, he keeps his actors steadfastly committed and the stakes stratospheric...

"Actually, any fears that 'Oh, Mary!' would lose its way in the big uptown move are dispelled within seconds. Escola's Mary is so enormous – practically planetary – that even a 922-seat can't contain her galvanic energy."