Review: Oh, Mary! Cole Escola’s Riotous Broadway Debut

She enters snarling, thirst on her lips and murderous rage in her eyes. This is Mary Todd Lincoln, as played by actor-playwright Cole Escola in their Broadway debut, Oh, Mary! This dubious historical fiction about our 16^th president and his first lady is now playing the Lyceum Theatre following a sold-out run at the Lucille Lortel Theatre off-Broadway. The show is even better in its uptown transfer, with bigger physical performances and punchier deliveries of the hilarious lines in Escola’s script. Laughs are rarely more than a few seconds apart. It is, without a doubt, the funniest comedy on Broadway right now.

The plot is like an episode of I Love Lucy written under the influence of ketamine. Abraham Lincoln (Conrad Ricamora) is in the thick of the Civil War and buckling under the immense weight of history. But his alcoholic wife (Escola) can only think of her thwarted cabaret career, which she abandoned for the sake of Abe’s political ambitions. Bored to tears with her long-suffering companion, Louise (Bianca Leigh), Mary longs for the adulation of her public. Barring that, she wishes something interesting would happen at the White House. “I wish we really were at war,” she tells her husband before stomping out of his office.

Abe conspires to distract Mary by hiring her a handsome young acting teacher (James Scully), but this only fuels her determination to return to the stage — especially when he seems to secure her an audition for Our American Cousin at Ford’s Theatre.

A fixture of the downtown cabaret scene and a writer on the television series At Home with Amy Sedaris, Escola buttresses a ludicrous premise with extravagantly crafted turns of phrase: “I dunno, maybe it’s because I can see gay men glaring at me with contempt, but it feels like home,” Mary says, scanning the audience as it erupts in laughter.

It’s Escola’s razor-sharp instincts as an actor, however, that really seal the deal. With impeccable comic timing and expressions that could be read from space (the stank face is epic), Escola grabs hold of our attention from the first beat and refuses to let go.

The supporting performances rise to the high bar Escola sets. Ricamora’s Lincoln is equal parts pathetic and menacing, his cruelty derived from real and lingering insecurity about his carnal urges. The adorable Tony Macht plays Simon, the president’s assistant and object of the great emancipator’s lecherous gaze. It’s a performance that tells a clear story about Washington courtiers: Degrading sexual acts are a small price to pay for a resume bump.

Handsome and furtive, Scully artfully conceals several of the script’s biggest secrets, unleashing the fury of Medea as the play hurtles toward its fateful conclusion. And Leigh, of all the actors, most comfortably inhabits the 1860s world of courtly manners and sexual repression. She makes an ideal foil for Escola’s demon child of a first lady.

Director Sam Pinkleton’s production is delightfully analog. The set (by dots) looks like it belongs onstage at Ford’s Theatre circa 1865, its fakery proudly worn like costume jewelry to a drag ball. Holly Pierson’s costumes are similarly stagey in a way that really complements the performances (Escola is having so much fun abusing that hoop dress).

Cha See’s lighting accentuates the comic beats, reddening with the president’s face. Sound designers Daniel Kluger and Drew Levy subtly amplify the performers so that we don’t miss a single brilliant line. And Kluger’s stormy piano music during blackout scene transitions reinforces the Victorian feeling of a play that is an intoxicating cocktail of old and new sensibilities.

On, Mary! marks the arrival of an exhilarating new voice on Broadway, a place that has been wanting for laughter. With this deliriously funny, slanderously inaccurate historical comedy, Escola gives it to the audience good and hard. Provided you can stop laughing long enough, it’s a breath of fresh air.