Oh, Mary! London review: Broadway smash falters in the West End
Oh, Mary! review and star rating: ★★
Historical revisioning – storytelling that presents key parts of history in new and often fantastical ways – has become a major trend through shows like Six and Hamilton. The latest, Oh, Mary!, is a comic imagining of the life of Abraham Lincoln’s wife Mary Todd Lincoln in the days before his assassination. Unlike Hamilton, which was a runaway hit on both sides of the pond, Oh, Mary! is a case study for how Transatlantic tastes can dramatically differ.
Cole Escola’s play, which won the 2025 Tony Award for Best Performance by a Leading Actor in a Play, features a roll call of physical slapstick and comedy lines about sexual identity that feel exactly like the sort of shtick that would wash in America but falter over here. The jokes, which feature characters outing one another and alluding to sexual acts, often feel underdeveloped and crude. Sometimes problematically so: the show leans heavily into LGBTQ culture, but often it feels as if the gag is ‘look at these silly gay people and the silly things they get up to.’
Our leading lady Mary Todd is presented as a deeply unhappy alcoholic stuck in a toxic marriage and yearning for her acting instructor, played by Dino Fetscher. It’s easy to endear to Mason Alexander Park’s playfully warm interpretation of Mary Todd, and Giles Terera – Aaron Burr in the West End’s original Hamilton cast – adds more sparkle to Sam Pinkleton’s production. Escola’s fairly linear storyline rarely grips, although there are four or five hilarious lines that are delivered near perfectly (I rarely laugh out loud but cackled more than once).
Oh, Mary! feels like one comedic bit about repressed sexuality extrapolated into a full-length play. The type of queer comedy written for largely straight mainstream Broadway audiences that lacks nuance.
Oh, Mary! plays at the Trafalgar Studios until 25 April