‘The new Hamilton’? Show with Mary Todd Lincoln as drunken first lady comes to London

What if, in the final weeks before Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, the first lady could not care less about the American civil war and was instead hell-bent on becoming a cabaret star?

That is the question posed by Oh, Mary!, the smash-hit show that reimagines Mary Todd Lincoln as a gloriously unhinged alcoholic who despises her closeted husband.

The 80-minute, one-act play opens in London’s West End next week after a blockbuster run in New York, where it was called “one of the best comedies in years”. It received Tony awards for best leading actor in a play (Cole Escola, who also wrote the show, and became the first non-binary performer to win the award) and best director (Sam Pinkleton).

Its runaway success drew a star-studded audience, including Steven Spielberg, Tony Kushner and Sally Field – who made the 2012 drama film Lincoln – as well as Meryl Streep, Robert Downey Jr, Sarah Paulson and Amy Adams. Observers are already asking whether it is “the new Hamilton”.

Rehearsals for Oh, Mary!, from left: Giles Terera, Mason Alexander Park and Kate O’Donnell. Photograph: Manuel Harlan

The acclaim is a long way from the show’s origins in 2009, when Escola conceived of Mary’s miserable life in a simple email sent to themself pondering: “What if Abe’s assassination wasn’t such a bad thing for Mary?” They did no further research.

“I wanted to make the stupidest, funniest thing possible,” Escola told the Run-Through with Vogue podcast. “My version of Mary Todd Lincoln is basically just me.

“Someone told me the other day, ‘After the show, I had to Google what was true and what wasn’t’. And I was like, ‘Oh no, do not trust my show at all to teach you about Mary Todd Lincoln’.”

But they added that there may be some unanticipated similarities with the real Mary, who was often criticised for her lavish spending and lack of emotional restraint. “There’s a telegram that someone sent Abraham Lincoln – it’s now in a museum – that was like, ‘Please come collect your wife, she’s making a fool of herself at this party’.”

Cole Escola accepts the award for best performance by an actor in a leading role at the Tony awards in June. Photograph: Charles Sykes/Invision/AP

The US actor Mason Alexander Park, who takes over from Escola as Mary at the Trafalgar theatre in London, said they could identify with the character because she is someone who wants to be good at what they do.

“I know what it’s like to desperately want something and to feel like there are external factors getting in the way. Everybody knows what it’s like to feel stilted or stuck and not know what to do with the gift you have inside you,” they said.

Park, who made their name in recent Jamie Lloyd Shakespeare productions in the West End, first watched Oh, Mary! on Broadway. “It was one of the most incredible experiences I’ve ever had in the theatre. I called my mom immediately to gush about it. I thought, ‘If there’s one thing I get to do in my lifetime, I would love for it to be this’.”

Catherine Clinton, the author of the biography Mrs Lincoln: A Life, and professor of history at the University of Texas at San Antonio, said authenticity was more important to her than accuracy.

“Anything that prompts a new look at Mary Lincoln gets my endorsement,” Clinton said. “And Oh, Mary! is a full-frontal pop cultural satire, with high jinks akin to perhaps the British panto. Escola blends several pop culture themes (Lincoln was gay, Mary was a shrew) into an unbelievable but nevertheless enjoyable romp.”

How the play fares with British audiences may well determine whether it can become a global pop culture phenomenon on the scale of Hamilton. Park said there were themes that everyone could identify with. “Mary is a mess and a menace. But she’s also someone who really wants to share what they have inside of them. We all want to be seen and loved.”

Clinton said Mary “is portrayed as such a melodramatic, larger-than-life character, that she will entertain with or without any historical background”.

The theatre critic Michael Billington said British theatres had played host to many plays about American presidents, ranging from Hamilton to the Stephen Sondheim musical Assassins. “Our whole culture, from TV to theatre and narrative fiction, is so steeped in Americana I often suspect that we know more about US politics than we do about our own,” he said.

For Nancy Durrant, a co-host of the London Theatre Review podcast, the play is more akin to shows such as Titanique, Operation Mincemeat and The Play That Goes Wrong than Hamilton. “I think the reason it has done so well is that it’s fundamentally ridiculous,” she said. “There’s a strong appetite for well-crafted, tightly written daftness, based on familiar concepts or in familiar settings.

“I wouldn’t like to speculate that audience enthusiasm for that kind of thing is the result of a global bin fire, because I think that people have always liked silliness – it’s rooted in joy – but I think the global bin fire probably doesn’t hurt.”

Dino Fetscher and Mason Alexander Park. Photograph: Manuel Harlan

The need to laugh is something Park highlighted too – particularly in a theatre with other people. “The world is quite literally crumbling around us. But it felt like everyone collectively relaxed watching this.”

Oh, Mary! is not the only contemporary play about Mary – John Ransom Phillips’s Mrs President opened earlier this year at the Charing Cross theatre in London.

Centuries after her death, in the age of TikTok and Instagram, Mary is being afforded a narrative of her own. “She endured the most vicious attacks of any first lady – until Hillary Clinton came along – and was dismissed by Lincoln biographers as a liability for well over a century,” Clinton said. “But she remains unsinkable.”

Escola has said their fascination with first ladies began in the third grade because they found the role so fundamentally weird. “You get it if your husband wins something.”

But their show has broken ground in ways that go beyond its irreverent take on history, helping to increase visibility of non-binary and trans performers.

“Cole winning the Tony was such a remarkable moment,” Park said. “In this political climate, trans identities and non-binary identities are constantly up for debate. Most of the time we’re excluded from those conversations to make it easier to dehumanise us. So it feels special and powerful to be a visible trans performer.”

They added: “Oh, Mary! began as small piece of theatre that was meant to be shared amongst friends with the same sense of humour, and then it turned into this massive phenomenon. Diversity creates better art.”