Oh, Mary!
It would be a mistake to say the humour in Cole Escola’s massive hit Broadway comedy has been lost in translation to the West End: there was a lot of laughter when I caught Oh, Mary! on a Wednesday matinee.
However, I’m afraid it was lost in translation to me.
I didn’t hate this lurid cabaret about Abraham Lincoln’s wife. But after the slew of American critics describing the life-changing injuries they’d suffered from laughing so hard at Sam Pinkleton’s production, the whole thing just felt a bit… ’70s? A little bit Airplane!, a little bit Benny Hill, maybe even a touch of Mr Bean… Really it’s broad, dated humour salvaged by a tremendous cast headed by Jamie Lloyd veteran Mason Alexander Park as Mary and the redoubtable Giles Terera as ‘Mary’s husband’ (ie Abe).
Of course, a lot of British people like ’70s humour: this is a country that still remains dangerously hooked on the 1976 Morecambe and Wise Christmas special. But Oh, Mary! is an old-fashioned farce built on two gags: one, Mary is a boozy narcissist – borderline feral – who dreams of the stage; and two, Abraham Lincoln is gay.
To be fair, there are few cows more sacred in America than Lincoln, and this is of course queer artist Escola co-opting the iconic president, not mocking gay people. Still I’d struggle to say what the difference would be in terms of execution. I don’t know much about Lincoln’s personal life, but the idea of him being a cartoonishly repressed gay man is not in and of itself that funny to me. ...