Review of the Week: Oh, Mary! at Trafalgar theatre

Trafalgar theatre, London SW1, until 25 April

“This performance will contain fog, haze, flashing lights, and ONE SINGLE GUNSHOT!” warns the old-timey notice in the foyer of the Trafalgar theatre. Oh, Mary! aligns with reality only to the extent that Abraham Lincoln, the 16th president of the United States, was indeed assassinated at Ford’s theatre in Washington DC on 14 April 1865, during a performance of Our American Cousin. The rest is not history.

Mary Todd Lincoln may have wrestled with bipolar disorder but she was not actually a feral, alcoholic banshee obsessed with reviving her cabaret career while completely ignorant of the civil war raging between North and South. (“The South of what?” she demands.) Nor was her husband a furiously repressed gay man who considered his “foul and hateful wife” a more fearsome antagonist than the Confederacy. In this account, the abolition of slavery is an irrelevance and the shattering loss of the Lincolns’ son Willie just a punchline. It would be a crime to spoil the loopy plot twists that produced gasps of genuine disbelief on the night I went.

Giles Terera, who was Aaron Burr when Hamilton first came to London, plays the president, but there the similarities between the two plays end. While Lin-Manuel Miranda took some obvious liberties (fact-check: the Founding Fathers couldn’t rap), he was sufficiently interested in real events that historians could reasonably quarrel with his decisions. Complaining about inaccuracies in Oh, Mary!, however, would be like footnoting Blackadder. It blasts through mere irreverence and hurdles heresy to reach a place of transcendent absurdity, albeit absurdity with a point. I was reminded of the famous definition of camp as “the lie that tells the truth”.

Oh, Mary! is an unlikely phenomenon. It opened off-Broadway for an expected two-month run in January 2024. Instead, it transferred to Broadway, grossed $1m a week, extended its tenure multiple times and won two Tony awards, all to the great surprise of its writer and original star, Cole Escola. 

It’s hard to define what Escola is doing and why it works so well. Oh, Mary! isn’t a musical even if it feels like one, with spontaneous applause after every scene. Thanks to Sam Pinkleton, a choreographer as well as a director, it’s far too agile and precise to be called an extended sketch but it has that energy, too – Dots’s sets and Holly Pierson’s costumes have a knowing artificiality. To call it a pantomime for adults would be only half-true, though it is both hysterically silly and subversively queer. Perhaps the reason for its unforeseen success is very simple: it is relentlessly, implausibly funny. Every reservation I had at the outset (Too shouty? Too hectic?) was soon blown to bits. Throughout its madcap 80 minutes, the audience around me was having a maniacally good time.

It's quite something to see an actor as commanding as Terera go straight from Hamlet to Abe’s seething mess of libido and self-loathing. Also good are Dino Fetscher as Mary’s dangerously attractive drama teacher, Kate O’Donnell as her prissy chaperone and Oliver Stockley as Abe’s twinky assistant. But let’s be real: this is Mary’s night. In New York, Escola has bequeathed the title role to a number of actors, including Jane Krakowski and Tituss Burgess (it’s a gender-blind, colour-blind affair). While I’m sure they were all fantastic, it’s now impossible for me to imagine anyone doing it better than Mason Alexander Park.

Mary’s tutor accuses her of reciting Shakespeare “like a horny snake in a newspaper cartoon”. Park, an American non-binary actor who played the emcee in Cabaret two years ago in the West End, does indeed have an eye-popping, illustrated quality, their wig a lampshade of corkscrew curls, their hoop skirt large enough to shelter a small family. Park’s attempt to climb down from the president’s desk is a delirious bit of physical comedy and Mary’s theatrical audition, improvising lines for the nurse from Romeo and Juliet in a demented cockney accent, is even funnier. But Park also nails an unexpectedly wrenching monologue about the rare “great days” that make the sad and boring ones even harder to accept.

Mary is a fiend, a narcissist, a chaos agent, an accident constantly happening. She screeches like a velociraptor, snarls like a cornered fox and swoops like a vampire bat. Yet she herself is bullied and manipulated, which lends surprising pathos to her appetite for destruction. “Oh mother!” she wails to the portrait of George Washington hanging in the Oval Office. “Why did I marry him?”

Lincoln’s real-life death – felled by an actor in a theatre – gives Escola the thematic heart that makes Oh, Mary! more than just a comedic bullet train. It’s about performance as both a cage (Abe is stuck in the nation’s most prestigious closet) and a liberation. Mary’s true love is cabaret (“Theatre is just fewer feathers and flatter shoes!”) because the role she most wants to play is her better, brighter self. Escola’s queering of the most hallowed chapter in American history is a celebration of the weirdos and dreamers who reject the scripts they have been given and hurl themselves pell-mell towards emancipation.