Honestly? I couldn’t stop laughing. Oh, Mary! is hilariously unhinged, deliciously irreverent, and proudly kinky. Camp with teeth.
Written by Cole Escola, the show reimagines Mary Todd Lincoln — in the weeks leading up to Abraham Lincoln’s assassination — as a desperate, alcoholic cabaret performer clawing her way back to the stage. Escola has said they wrote it from “our collective third-grade understanding” of who Mary Todd Lincoln was. And trust me, this is definitely not that Mary. The joke is the inaccuracy.
History is treated like a cheap prop, and that refusal of reverence is exactly where the comedy lives.
In the West End production at Trafalgar Theatre, Mason Alexander Park is phenomenal; a farcical, electrifying tour de force that leans fully into the chaos, the booze, and the camp delirium of this re-invented First Lady.
The rest of the cast are equally committed, creating a world of camp with a high degree of self-awareness that somehow makes it all feel genuinely alive rather than forced. Huge kudos to the incredible Giles Terera, and to Kate O’Donnell — finally making her West End debut. Long overdue. She’s extraordinary. Do you research.
The writing uses excess, bodily comedy, and verbal precision as tools of disruption. It’s stupid in the way camp is stupid: built with intent, and absolutely laughing at you while it does. At its core, Oh, Mary! is about what happens when artistic desire is crushed by social expectation. Mary wants to perform, to make art, to live beyond the suffocating role assigned to her; and every man around her insists they know what’s best.
Power, history, and patriarchy conspire to keep her small; and if you’re part of this Theatre Fam, I’m guessing you’ve felt some version of that pressure too. The show is also deeply invested in queering sacred American history. And I love this! Every character operates in a heightened camp register; queerness is the grammar.
There’s something deliciously defiant about taking one of America’s most sanctified icons (so often claimed by conservatives) and making the world around them messy, drunk, gay, and desperate. Camp has always been a queer survival strategy, a way of laughing at systems that refuse to let you exist fully.
And while Oh, Mary! doesn’t lecture about contemporary politics, it absolutely side-eyes conservative obsessions with historical purity, heteronormativity, and rigid gender roles. It feels like a playful middle finger to the reactionary wave of bigotry sweeping the West.
We’re living through desperate times, watching hard-won social ground slide backwards. Laughing together at the absurdity of repression? Sadly, very 2026.
One last thing: despite its Broadway success, Oh, Mary! still feels like an insider’s comedy.
It rewards a deep familiarity with queer culture and, according to my NYC friends, especially with New York’s queer underground. Apparently, the most steeped audiences are catching dozens of extra layers.
Which, frankly, just makes me love it more. In a world that keeps trying to flatten queer nuance into populist stereotypes, that multi-layered riot of a play feels like a goddamn gift.
