With Oh, Mary! Cole Escola Has No Interest in History, Really

In 2009, the alt-comedian and occasional Bernadette Peters impersonator Cole Escola had an idea for a play: “What if Abe’s assassination wasn’t such a bad thing for Mary Todd Lincoln?”

They sat on the idea for more than a decade, finally getting around to writing it during the pandemic lockdown. “It was just one of those really, really, really rare things that just poured out me in like two days," Escola told Broadway.com Editor-in-Chief Paul Wontorek. "Everything else that I've written has taken months, years, to even get to a decent place.”

“At first," Escola added, "I wrote it for my audience, which is just drunk gay people, and they loved it. And then more other types of people started coming…”

Starring Escola as Mary Todd and Conrad Ricamora as Abraham Lincoln, Oh, Mary! was a word-of-mouth sensation when it played downtown at the Lucille Lortel Theatre. Now, it has begun performances at Broadway’s Lyceum Theatre, where it officially opens on July 11.

It’s not about “queering history,” said Escola—that would suggest some semblance of historical accuracy, when Oh, Mary! is gleefully, gloriously, maybe even irresponsibly counterfactual. “I've had people say to me afterwards, ‘I had to Google… I didn't know what was true and what was not." And I was like, ‘Oh my god, no, don't Google. Just assume that everything from the show is a lie.’”

Check out the video with the full interview with Escola below.