Oh, my! Mary Todd Lincoln is a drunken wannabe cabaret star! Her husband Abraham, the 16th US president, is a closet homosexual! And her acting tutor – also Abraham’s ex – is a hunk in tight breeches who might have wandered off the set of a 70s porn film! They all variously swear, sing and engage in acts of sexual desperation!
Oh, why, when Cole Escola’s play comes garlanded from Broadway for its send-up of the 19th-century first couple, did this critic sit with a frozen face through the whole sorry fandango? Billed as an uproarious black comedy about Mary’s life and times in the lead-up to Abraham’s assassination, the original production starred Escola as Mary. This transfer features Mason Alexander Park as the obstreperous lush, with Giles Terera as her civil war-fielding husband.
Escola’s show left US audiences in stitches with its camp chaos but contains the kind of low-hanging fruit that Kenny Everett’s team might have rejected. You can virtually see the jokes coming around the corner before the punchlines drop. The camp comedy contains less subversion, more American Pie-levels of puerile humour. How uproariously funny is it to see Mary raise her hoop skirt to reveal patterned bloomers? Or watch her throw up in a bucket and drink her vomit?
Directed by Sam Pinkleton, this is farce at its broadest (the set, designed by the collective dots, has two doors to ram that home). It is big, loud, crowdpleasingly obvious. The programme suggests that the retro naffness and cartoonish stereotypes are deliberate but the show still amounts to nothing more. You wonder what the purpose is behind the larking.
Oh, Mary, maybe there is no purpose and I am being contrary?! Because the room on the night I attended was lapping up the panto spirit, even if I felt cheated of story, character, wit or wonder. The production, hot from Tony awards success, features an undeniable musical talent in Park (see Jamie Lloyd’s The Tempest and Much Ado About Nothing) but they are wasted on the slapstick here with a song medley at the end which never becomes dramatic enough to allow their glorious voice to shine.
And how meaningful can any of it be if the writer, by their admission, has undertaken “no research” into Mary Todd Lincoln’s life story? Satire and black comedy as genres are built to accommodate social observation and acid critique, but there is none of that here. You learn next to nothing of how Mary may have been held back or shaped by history in this apparently “revisionist” version. Instead, you get the dramas of the men around her, from Abraham’s hidden homosexuality to his ex-lover (Dino Fetscher) and current squeeze (Oliver Stockley). Mary is simply repulsive and every other character laughs at her behind her back.
It is such an overheated sophomoric comedy that it becomes exhausting to watch, even at 90 minutes. Not so much Oh, Mary! as Bye, Felicia!
