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The world will hardly notice or long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.
Photo: Emilio Madrid
There’s a classic gag where a character has his pants pulled down to reveal his heart-print boxers. It’s the kind of vaudeville joke you rarely see outside of comic strips like garfield. But halfway Oh Maria!As Mary Todd Lincoln climbs onto a desk in the Oval Office in a fit of passion and fury, throwing her crinoline at the audience, there they are: white and red and, no matter how sophisticated you think you are, probably making you laugh.
The moment is typical of the madcap approach of Cole Escola, who has made a name for himself in alternative comedy and cabaret acts with a distinctive blend of diva worship, queer aesthetics, and scatology, but is only now making his Off-Broadway debut. I first came across Escola’s work through Bernadette Peters’ impressions of her on YouTube (when his accountant asks him about charitable donations, Escola’s Bernadette cheerfully says he, “I gave all my winnings to Elaine Paige.”) But if you’re already a fan of Escola (the guy is a generally medicated queer coastal comedy snob), you’re probably also familiar with his manic twink in difficult people and Search party or his parodies of true crime and western television kitsch like Little house on the prairie. Escola tends to appear on the sidelines of other people’s film projects or in smaller, low-budget works. In Oh Maria!However, they have built a star vehicle for themselves, and it is a work of deranged beauty: a version of Mary Todd Lincoln told (as the press release suggests) “through the lens of an idiot,” performed with all the Verve and Severity of Bette Davis with bath salts.
Expect only a superficial resemblance to historical accuracy. Elsewhere, Mary is often depicted as a mourner upset by her lost children, who came from a wealthy Kentucky family and who, arguablyHe lived with a mental illness. This Mary is a gremlin-like former cabaret star with no interest in her children, who married Abe Lincoln (Fire Island‘sand Here lies love‘s Conrad Ricamora) when he was young and confused. Look, this Lincoln definitely likes men (Hey, that’s also debatable.), although he prays to God to restrain him… while he receives a blowjob from his assistant. In Oh Maria!with Abe immersed in the Civil War with the South (“… of that?” is her recurring refrain), Mary breaks into the White House looking for ways to get alcohol and entertain herself. She torments her companion, Louise (Bianca Leigh, prim as a Pick-a-Little lady in The music man), drinks paint thinner, has his stomach pumped, so he vomits up the paint thinner and then drinks the vomit. With strong encouragement from Abe, she finally agrees to take lessons so she can become an actress in “legitimate theater,” words spoken with parodic wonder.
The meta joke within the conceit is that Escola, in ascending to an off-Broadway stage, is doing something a little like what Mary is doing, although they too refuse to stay legitimate for long. Cabaret, Mary insists to Abe, is a world-class art form: “People traveled all over the world for my short legs and long medleys!” Escola has written scenes that resemble an old melodrama and then punctured them with bursts of broad, dirty comedy. They’re climbing the ladder built by Mike & Carlee Productions, the powerhouse producers who have propelled several comedians, including Alex Edelman and Kate Berlant, to prestigious theatrical accolades, but they haven’t prepared this material for a broader audience. or tried to rise above him. And them In fact commit to a gag. Escola is a world-class raider, capable of timing a double take with nanosecond precision, telegraphing that he may be coming up with a joke and therefore delivering it with twice the force you’d expect. When Mary’s acting teacher, played by James Scully in Fiyero pants, comes on stage for the first time to give her Shakespeare lessons, Mary sees him and unleashes a prolonged “fuck”To her beauty.
Sam Pinkleton, a director with a background in choreography (he did the movement for Here we are), gets everything flowing fast enough for this soufflé to stay puffed. Oh Maria! It’s 80 minutes long and anything more could start to wear on the audience. No matter how absurd the plot developments become, and you’re in for something real nonsense that involves the production of Our American cousin at Ford’s Theater: no one is bitter because of disdain, no one looks down on his character. Ricamora gives Abe a genuine stormy angst that makes you forget he’s not tall enough for the role (that’s also part of the joke, maybe), and Leigh and Scully find a rhythm between playing against Mary’s antics and add some quirks of your own. Louise, we quickly learn, has a secret affection for dropping ice cream on her nether regions. But of course.
Escola might have intended to write this work themselves, but in the second third of the century Oh Maria! I began to wonder if Mary was being pushed aside. The First Lady, for all the warmth Escola invests in her, remains a battering ram character, pounding every scene she’s in into a familiar shape (she’s going to do something crazy!), while the rest of the set may be a little more nuanced. The play manages to sneak in a revelation and backstory, both obvious and too charming to spoil, that gives Scully and Ricamora some surprisingly moving emotional ground. (It also causes a change of scenery in a hall built by the Dots design team with a kind of loving reverence to the artistic style of community theater.) Should the play have followed the advice of Mary’s acting teacher and relegated her to… shudder…a part of the character?
Fear not: Escola and Mary must not be overshadowed. After a delicious breakup in the third act, Mary makes it clear that she is the undisputed star of this show, and Oh Maria! ends up burning in, yes, a glorious cabaret. Finally we witness some of his legendary crazy medleys in a sequence that approximates the dynamics of “The pink turn” told by an idiot, full of sound (the chosen melodies are… not Sondheim) and fury. Escola tears down the façade of the legitimate theater to reveal that everything is painted underneath, or perhaps raises it to the level of pure dazzling sensation. I’m not really sure right now. She was too busy laughing.
Oh Maria! is at the Lucille Lortel theater.