"Oh, Mary!" at the Lyceum Theatre

Cole Escola in "Oh, Mary!"
(The Lyceum Theatre, 2024)

Last month, my wife and I took a whirlwind, twenty-four hour journey to New York City. The past several years, since the quarantine, we have tried to get back at least once a year. Life is too short and we have the miles.

Why now? For my birthday she got me tickets to see Oh, Mary! Cole Escola’s outrageous, ahistorical comedy, centering on the character of Mary Todd Lincoln. I have had a fascination with this show (and Escola) since it opened Off-Broadway earlier this year, a fascination bordering on obsession.

Clips of the show and interviews with its creator had popped up on my socials, and I followed the show as it went from the Lucille Lortel to the Lyceum, a Broadway upgrade for an absurd, profane and deeply queer little drag show.

I was shocked when I received her gift – I hadn’t thought to actually see it! A limited summer run had been expanded into November (and just announced, through January) and anyway, I was thrilled. My love takes me to the best places.

We’d fly in Saturday night, stay in Times Square, see a Sunday matinee and pop out again that night. I worried that on a Sunday matinee there may be an understudy (spoiler, there was not) and things being how they are, we were both concerned about the dependability of air travel, but there were no unpleasant surprises there, either.

I have never stayed in the Times Square district before, my spouse is always very good at finding places in interesting and much less absurd Manhattan neighborhoods. But it’s not like the 1970s, our room was immaculate and stylish (and tiny, of course, who cares) set high above the chaos.

Riding along on a carousel!

We dropped our bags in our room, freshened up and sought out The Rum House for cocktails, live jazz, and the most expensive dish of mixed nuts. The band was lively and engaging, a trio of men all somewhat older than myself, piano, trumpet and washboard, that last doubled as the singer, a scruffy ringer for Bobcat Goldthwait with beard and pork pie hat. The drinks were creamy and excellent, she watched the crowd and I kept an eye on the passersby on 47th Street.

No one smokes. I watched maybe a hundred people pass by the window, none of them were smoking, it really is amazing.

The next morning we were able to lie about a while and relax and talk (there is no one I would rather do nothing at all with) before having brunch at the hotel and taking a walk up and out of Times Square and into Central Park.

There are those who refer to NYC as an urban hellscape, but all I could see were families playing, folks running or biking, musicians and magicians, all on a bright beautiful late summer day.

There was a meadow, too, like a natural, untended meadow we found, one that has been recently established, and walked through. It did my heart good.

We had a moment of crisis waiting for a ride on the Central Park Carousel when I casually mentioned that Trump owns it – I don’t remember where I heard that – so she did some research and found that thought Trump Organization had once paid for maintenance of the carousel, following the events of January 6, the city broke all financial ties with the former president.

We took a delightful spin on the carousel.

Caption: Romeo & Juliet, 1995

The Lyceum is the oldest, continuously operating Broadway theater, designed in the Beaux-Arts style, which basically means its very fancy, ornately decorated and very fussy. The lobby and staircases feature photographs of the many storied entertainers who have played that stage over the past 120 years – but also, if you are paying attention, you will notice there are also currently photos of Cole Escola starring in fictional productions of Doubt, Fun Home, Romeo and Juliet, and many others. Captions attributed to the artist explain how each of these shows were complete economic and critical disasters.

Several of these photos were also on display above urinals in the gentlemen’s toilet.

Oh, Mary! Is about a frustrated former cabaret singer trapped in a loveless marriage to a closeted man who happens to be Abraham Lincoln and she the sixteenth First Lady of the United States of America.

When Seth Myers asked them about how much research they had done to write the script, Escola replied, “I did less than no research. I actively forgot things I knew about Mary Todd Lincoln.”

They went on to stress that the show is a comedy, and that they wanted it to be accessible to everyone, that there are no “in-jokes” about the life of Mary Todd Lincoln, though there is one big “in-joke” where the audience discovers the identity of the acting tutor Lincoln has hired to occupy his manic spouse.

Post-show cheeseburger.

Cleveland playwright Thomas P. Cullinan wrote another chamber play about the life of Mary Todd. Mrs. Lincoln premiered at the Cleveland Play House in 1968 and, like this newer play, was also held over six months due to its enormous popularity. That is where the similarity ends, however, as Mrs. Lincoln (starring Evie McElroy in the eponymous role) is a psychological drama about the years after the assassination when the historical Mrs. Lincoln was institutionalized.

Plain Dealer critic Peter Bellamy was effusive, calling Mrs. Lincoln, "an absorbing, engrossing and literate play" adding that" nobody could portray the mercurial Mrs. Lincoln with more theatrical effect that Evie McElroy. Her performance is a truly great one."

In his review for the Cleveland Press, Tony Mastroianni called Mrs. Lincoln, “an evening of theater that is both entertaining and informative.” And it is informative, indeed. It is a challenge balancing the forward momentum of a plot with facts.

From Mrs. Lincoln:

MARY: I’d as soon dine with Billy Herndon as with that man!
SALLY: Now who’s Billy Herndon?
MARY: My husband’s law partner.

Escola said they didn’t want to be writing jokes thinking “that’ll get a laugh because that’s where she was born!” Or because that's her husband’s law partner! I get it now. Of course, Cullinan was not writing an historical comic play ... but I have, or I have tried to. And mine are all a bit too heady.

From These Are the Times:

VOICE: Looks like you’re quite a baseball fan!

CHILD: You see this letter “C” on my cap? That stands for Cleveland, and it’s a logo I can be proud of!

VOICE: And HOW!

Cringe. I'm working on that.

The fictional protagonist of Oh, Mary! fares much better than Cullinan’s factual one, achieving her dreams of returning to the cabaret stage, though, who knows? Maybe she has also gone mad. But what a way to go!

My wife and I were both also delighted with Conrad Ricamora, who plays Lincoln starting at an eleven and going higher from there. The entire ensemble is a master class in comic tropes and timing. I'm so glad I got to see this show.

GUESS THE SHOW: 

A. "The character of Mrs. Lincoln is at once tragic, funny, pathetic and unbalanced."

B. "An acting style that’s as expressionistic as a silent movie or opera ... while at the same time imposing an almost balletic control over gesture and pose."

C. "There were times when a movement or intonation reminded me of the late Ruth Feather ..."

Sources:

"Mrs. Lincoln's Torment Staged" by Peter Bellamy, The Plain Dealer, 11/2/1968

"Mrs. Lincoln's Fascinates Through Fresh Viewpoint" by Tony Mastroianni, The Cleveland Press, 11/2/1968

Late Night With Seth Meyers, May 7, 2024 (NBC)
Cleveland Arts Prize, Thomas P. Cullinan (Literature, 1971)
"What Makes ‘Oh, Mary!’ One of the Best Summer Comedies in Years" by Jesse Green, The New York Times, 7/11/1968

Guess The Show:

A. Mrs. Lincoln (Mastroianni)

B. Oh, Mary! (Green)

C. Mrs. Lincoln (Bellamy)

How I Spent My Summer (2024)

Puffball

What have I been doing this summer? I’ll tell you what I have not been doing, writing blog posts.

You may have noticed a considerable decline in posts since I received my degree well over a year ago. There is a very good reason for this, I have been writing other things. I’ve just changed; when I think of an idea for a post, I am suddenly struck with an urge to do something, anything else.

So?

This weekend, Labor Day Weekend, the official close of the season, we are lounging in A-Town with the out-laws, staying cool, sampling the scorpion pepper roasted garlic sauce the younger whipped up just before we drove him back to school a few weeks ago (it’s really hot and it’s really good).

After a year away, it was really nice having him home for the summer, getting to spend time with him and with his boyfriend. In late July we all went to Maine where I think I have finally embraced my destiny as the Old Man on the Porch. We were there for two weeks this year, longer than I have stayed in decades, playing host to my brother and his family from England, our friend Sarah and – oh my – a dog!

We came to home to find that one of our cats was ailing; the cats are both fourteen years old, and Puffball has had a variety of difficulties, with his kidneys, with his thyroid. But now it was much more serious, a blood cancer, and we said goodbye to him last week.

Fifteen years ago I lost a dear pet, the eighteen year old Rosencrantz. We met when I was twenty-three, living in an apartment off Coventry, he died when I was forty, with a house and two living children. Losing him was losing my young adulthood. We got Puffy when the kids were five and seven, now they are both away at school. So it goes.

But these are endings. We began the season with a celebration of our twenty-five years married, and also our thirty years as a couple. The wife surprised me with a couple extra events, tickets to see the Guardians, an excessive dinner at the Marble Room.

We’ve probably attended (and also watched, and listened to) more Guardians games this summer than any time previous. I’ve also seen a couple of films at the Cinematheque. Usually I might see one a year, now I am a member. I saw The People’s Joker in July, last weekend we saw the recently reedited (?) Caligula. I’ve put their calendar on the wall in the kitchen, there’s a lot of funky things to check out this fall.

Golden Girls - The Laughs Continue

I have also spent a lot more time at the Cedar-Lee, our local independent theatre. Two of the several movies I caught this summer were Ghostlight and Sing Sing, which are moving, each in their own way, and they are part of a genre without a name, a story through which someone who has never acted before is drawn into an amateur theatrical and it transforms their life. 

But! Speaking of the kitchen, ever since I bought this place (thirty-one years next month) I have wanted to redo the floor of the kitchen. Something else always came first – including getting new counters and cabinets and ceiling for the kitchen over fifteen years ago. We finally had the floor leveled, guys put in Marmoleum and I finished by painting the baseboards and trim around the doors. Another life goal accomplished!

Meet the floor.

What I’d like to be able to share is some great summer theater news, but there’s nothing to report, not really. Not much. I had the chance to take in a rehearsal of the Cleveland Shakespeare Festival production of King Lear before we left town. We also took in some high-camp hilarity at the Hanna with a performance of Golden Girls - The Laughs Continue.

The Toothpaste Millionaire revival at BorderLight went over well, though I was out of town for the festival this year. I had a reading for a new script I’m working on back in May, and that is something I have plans to rework through the rest of the year.

And that's really the thing, you know? Work. Happy Labor Day. Get back to work.