Oh, Mary! The Gleefully Deranged Comedy That Conquered Broadway, Broke Every Record at the Lyceum — and Refuses to Stop Running

A miserable, alcoholic, cabaret-obsessed Mary Todd Lincoln. A nonbinary comedian making their Broadway debut as both playwright and star. Five Tony nominations, two wins, a Pulitzer Prize finalist citation, thirteen box office records broken, and a celebrity casting carousel that has turned one of Broadway’s most beloved comedies into a permanent New York institution. This is the story of Oh, Mary!

Published: 27 May 2026  ·  Currently Running at the Lyceum Theatre, Broadway  ·  Sources: Broadway.com, Playbill, BroadwayWorld, Broadway Direct, TheaterMania, Time Out New York, New York Times, Variety, The Guardian, London Theatre Direct, Show-Score, Deadline

Who Is Cole Escola? The Downtown Comedian Who Changed Broadway

Before Oh, Mary!, Cole Escola was what the entertainment industry calls a cult figure: enormously beloved within a specific, savvy community — the downtown New York comedy and cabaret scene, the LGBTQ+ arts world, the audience for the kind of extremely specific, extremely queer, extremely funny internet content that accumulates devoted followers one viewer at a time — and almost completely unknown to the mainstream. They had appeared on television, most notably in Search Party (as the unforgettable Patrick, assistant to the terrifying Chip Wreck) and in At Home with Amy Sedaris and Difficult People. They had performed in downtown cabarets and developed a YouTube following for their genre of comedy — historical parody, camp excess, and a timing so precise it borders on the uncanny. They were, as the theatrical community puts it, a known quantity in the right circles.

They are nonbinary — using they/them pronouns — and their comedy has always operated in the space where gender performance, historical absurdity, and genuine psychological observation collide. The sensibility that makes their work distinctive is impossible to describe precisely but immediately recognisable in practice: a kind of gleeful, absolutely committed commitment to a bit, paired with an underlying intelligence that gives even the most outrageous material a human core. When they wrote Oh, Mary! — based on, as the press notes put it, “the forgotten life and dreams of Mrs. Lincoln, through the lens of an idiot (Cole Escola)” — they were applying this sensibility to one of American history’s most discussed and least examined figures.

Their performance in the show won the 2025 Tony Award for Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role in a Play — making them the first nonbinary performer ever to win a Tony Award in an acting category. It was a genuinely historic moment, received with enormous warmth by the theatrical community and with something close to delirium by the audiences who had already fallen completely in love with the show.

The Plot: Mary Todd Lincoln’s Forgotten Dreams, Alcoholism, and Cabaret Aspirations

To describe the plot of Oh, Mary! accurately is to risk making it sound either more serious or more absurd than it actually is — which is a tribute to the skill with which Escola has calibrated every element. It is, at its core, a dark comedy set in the weeks leading up to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Mary Todd Lincoln — a figure who has historically been portrayed as either hysterical, tragic, or merely background — is re-examined here as a woman whose inner life has been comprehensively suffocated: by marriage, by the presidency, by the expectations of a society that had no space for what she actually wanted to be.

And what Mary Todd Lincoln — Escola’s Mary, Escola’s demented and hilarious and surprisingly affecting Mary — wants to be is a cabaret star. This is the play’s central and utterly inspired comic premise: that the First Lady of the United States, in the most fraught weeks of the Civil War, is secretly training with a handsome drama coach, sneaking out of the White House, and nursing a comprehensive alcoholism while her husband is simultaneously consumed with lust for a young male underling.

The show runs for just 80 minutes with no intermission, and it moves at the pace of a bullet. The comedy operates on multiple levels simultaneously: there is pure farce (pratfalls, anachronisms, physical gags that ambush the audience into helpless laughter), there is sharp historical satire (the play gleefully punctures the sanctimony with which Americans tend to treat the Lincoln era), and there is, beneath all the chaos, a genuine and surprisingly moving portrait of a woman whose dreams have been erased by history and who is, in Escola’s telling, absolutely determined to reclaim them — even if the method of reclamation is objectively insane.

The supporting characters are equally inspired. Mary’s Husband — Abraham Lincoln, whom Escola’s Mary addresses with a weary contempt that is one of the show’s running gags — is portrayed as an easily distracted, slightly dim romantic, consumed with feelings for his young male assistant. Mary’s Teacher — the handsome drama coach — is the object of Mary’s forbidden crush. Mary’s Chaperone provides the prim foil against which Mary’s excesses play. And Mary’s Husband’s Assistant — the object of Lincoln’s affections — completes a domestic tableau of spectacular dysfunction.

None of this is historically accurate — the show cheerfully announces this — and that’s entirely the point. Oh, Mary! is not a history play. It is a comedy about what history chooses to remember, what it chooses to forget, and why the forgotten lives of women — even first ladies — deserve, at minimum, a standing ovation and a glass of champagne.

The Off-Broadway Run: How It All Began at the Lucille Lortel

The story of Oh, Mary! begins not on Broadway but in Greenwich Village, at the Lucille Lortel Theatre on Christopher Street — one of Off-Broadway’s most storied and beloved venues, whose Playwrights’ Sidewalk outside the entrance honours the great figures of American dramatic writing, including camp-comedy legends Charles Ludlam and Charles Busch. Time Out’s Adam Feldman, in his five-star review, noted that by adding his name to that walk with Oh, Mary!, Escola had “stake[d] a strong claim to being the next step” in that lineage. He was not wrong.

The Off-Broadway production opened in February 2024 with the same cast that would largely carry over to Broadway: Escola as Mary, Conrad Ricamora as Mary’s Husband, James Scully as Mary’s Teacher, Bianca Leigh as Mary’s Chaperone, Tony Macht as Mary’s Husband’s Assistant, and Hannah Solow and Peter Smith completing the company. The production was directed by Sam Pinkleton — now a multiple Tony Award-winner who has since also directed the Broadway premiere of The Rocky Horror Show.

The critical response was immediate and overwhelming. Time Out New York gave it five stars and declared it “the funniest play in years.” The show’s run was extended once, then a second time, then a third. In what is practically unheard of for a small Off-Broadway production, it sold out every remaining performance of every extension the moment tickets became available. By the time the production closed at the Lucille Lortel in June 2024 in preparation for its Broadway transfer, it had become one of the most talked-about theatrical events in New York that year — and the Broadway transfer had been announced in April 2024 to widespread excitement and immediate ticket demand.

The Off-Broadway run also established the production’s identity as something genuinely distinctive: not merely a funny play but a specific, fully realised world that Escola and Pinkleton had created with total intentionality. The Lucille Lortel’s intimate space — where you could see every expression on Escola’s face and feel the audience’s laughter as a physical sensation — turned out to be the ideal laboratory for a comedy that depends so completely on the performer’s ability to share every flicker of thought with the room.

Broadway Opening: The Lyceum Theatre, July 2024, and the Records That Followed

When Oh, Mary! transferred to Broadway’s Lyceum Theatre — the beautiful Beaux Arts house at 149 West 45th Street, built in 1903 and the oldest continuously operating Broadway theatre in New York City — it brought with it nearly its complete Off-Broadway creative team and an audience hunger that the slightly larger venue (895 seats) was perfectly sized to meet.

Previews began on 26 June 2024. The official Broadway opening was 11 July 2024. The production was originally announced as a 12-week limited engagement, running through 15 September 2024. It has since been extended, repeatedly and indefinitely, and tickets are currently on sale through 3 January 2027 — making it one of the longest-running limited engagements in Broadway history.

The commercial results were staggering from almost immediately. Within weeks of opening, the show became the first production in the Lyceum Theatre’s 121-year history to gross more than $1,000,000 in a single week — a milestone that triggered considerable press attention and confirmed that the downtown cult phenomenon had fully crossed over into mainstream Broadway success. The show subsequently broke that record twelve more times, with the highest single-week gross reaching $1,225,937 (for the week ending 24 November 2024, the Thanksgiving week), at an average ticket price of $171.32.

The production recouped its entire $4,525,000 capitalisation and became the first show of the 2024-25 Broadway season to recoup its investment — a commercial achievement that made it, simultaneously, the season’s most artistically celebrated and most commercially successful production. TheaterMania noted that with a lifetime average ticket price of $150, and 30 percent of the theatre’s 895 seats priced below $100, the show had achieved this record-breaking performance with an unusually democratic ticket pricing structure.

The Nine Marys: Broadway’s Most Celebrated Revolving Door

One of the most distinctive and commercially ingenious aspects of Oh, Mary!‘s Broadway run has been the production’s strategy of periodic celebrity replacements in the title role — a strategy that has turned each new casting announcement into a media event, generated sustained press attention throughout the run, and introduced the show to the specific fan bases of each successive star. The result has been one of Broadway’s most spectacular celebrity casting parades, with each new Mary generating a fresh wave of ticket demand and making the show feel, perpetually, like it has something new to offer even to people who have already seen it.

Broadway Direct maintains the definitive record of every performer who has played Mary Todd Lincoln on Broadway. Here is the complete list:

The supporting cast has remained largely consistent throughout the run, providing the continuity and the technical precision that each new Mary needs to find her footing. Phillip James Brannon has played Mary’s Husband for much of the run. Bianca Leigh as Mary’s Chaperone has been one of the production’s most consistent and most praised presences — her comic partnership with each successive Mary is one of the show’s great pleasures. Cheyenne Jackson has returned to the cast as Mary’s Teacher for several engagements. Tony Macht as Mary’s Husband’s Assistant has been a constant throughout. Understudies Hannah Solow, Martin Landry, and Julian Manjerico complete the company.

What the Critics Said: The Reviews That Made History

The Box Office Records: How Oh, Mary! Made Lyceum History

The commercial performance of Oh, Mary! is so extraordinary that it deserves its own detailed examination. What is particularly remarkable is not simply that the show broke records, but the consistency and the frequency with which it has done so across a run that now exceeds two years.

The box office performance of Oh, Mary! is a case study in how commercial theatre success can be generated by purely artistic means. The show had no pre-existing IP, no famous source film or novel, no A-list star attached at its Off-Broadway premiere. It had a queer comedian in their Broadway debut, a clever premise, and a director who knew exactly what to do with both of those assets. The rest is box office history.

The celebrity replacement strategy — which was not part of the original plan but evolved organically as the show’s cultural momentum grew and famous admirers began approaching the producers — has been an additional commercial accelerant. Each new Mary announcement generates a wave of fresh media attention, ticket sales spike for the debut week, and audience members who have already seen the show often come back to experience a new interpretation. It is a virtuous commercial cycle that the producers have managed with considerable skill.

Taking Over London: The West End Transfer at the Trafalgar Theatre

The international ambitions of Oh, Mary! were confirmed when Cole Escola made their West End debut — performing in the title role they created — at the Trafalgar Theatre in London, which opened on 18 December 2025 and ran through 25 April 2026. Sam Pinkleton reprised his Tony-winning direction for the London production, ensuring the show arrived in the West End at the full quality that had made it a New York institution.

The critical response was unanimous. London Theatre Direct reported that the production was hailed as “mesmerising” and “deliriously funny,” and that Escola’s performance elicited the same helpless, full-body laughter from London audiences that New York had been experiencing since February 2024. The Guardian’s four-star review called it “a gloriously deranged historical romp.” The West End run sold out its limited engagement, and discussions about a possible extension or return were reported, though no further London dates have been confirmed at press time.

The Creative Team: The People Behind the Magic

The production’s consistent quality across more than two years and nine different leading performers is not accidental. It reflects the specific strengths of a creative team that built the show to be simultaneously fixed — in its structure, its design, its theatrical values — and flexible enough to accommodate very different interpretations of the central role.

Sam Pinkleton‘s direction creates a comic architecture so precise that each new Mary can inhabit it without having to rebuild it. He describes the show as having been designed to be “structurally robust” — meaning the set pieces, the timing, the physical grammar of each scene are established clearly enough that a new performer can learn them, own them, and then find her own specific voice within them. His Tony Award for Best Direction of a Play recognises this achievement: the creation not of a single production but of a theatrical machine that keeps delivering joy regardless of who steps into the machine’s central role.

The design team — dots (Scenic Design), Holly Pierson (Costume Design), Cha See (Lighting Design), Daniel Kluger (Sound Design and Original Music), and Leah J. Loukas (Wig Design, including the now-iconic “bratty curls” that identify each Mary) — created a visual world that is simultaneously historically suggestive and theatrically artificial, allowing the play’s radical ahistoricity to feel intentional rather than accidental. The iconic curly wig has become, across nine wearers, a Broadway icon in its own right: shorthand for a specific kind of theatrical confidence, the kind that says “we know this is absurd and we are absolutely committed to it.”

Currently Running and What Comes Next

As of May 2026, Oh, Mary! is in the middle of Maya Rudolph’s extended run as Mary Todd Lincoln — a run that broke two all-time Lyceum box office records in its opening week and has continued to draw extraordinary crowds and box office performance. Rudolph, who had a famous quote on receiving the casting: “I’ve never seen myself in a character the way I see myself in Mary — which is strange because I don’t even drink,” plays the role through 5 July 2026.

From 6 July through 12 September 2026, Meg Stalter — the breakout star of HBO’s Hacks — makes her own Broadway debut in the role, completing a trio of comedy legends who represent three different generations and sensibilities of American comedy: Rudolph (SNL lineage), Stalter (internet-era comedy), and the show’s creator Escola (downtown cabaret and queer comedy). Stalter’s statement — “When I first met Cole Escola, they said, ‘I thought I was too old to feel this excited and giddy about a new friend,’ and that’s exactly how I felt when I met Mary Todd Lincoln for the first time” — has been widely celebrated as capturing the particular magic the role seems to exercise on every performer who takes it on.

Tickets are currently on sale through 3 January 2027, with casting for the period after Stalter’s run yet to be announced. Given the show’s track record of generating headline-making celebrity replacements, the announcement of who plays Mary after September 2026 will itself be a major Broadway news event.

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