Let me tell you—Broadway doesn’t need to be that serious
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Let me tell you about some terrific shows that didn’t change my life.
We can start with Cole Escola’s riotous comedy Oh, Mary!, the surprise hit of the year, in which Escola plays Mary Todd Lincoln as a boozy, raunchy, idiotic egomaniac. After a sold-out run at Greenwich Village’s Lucille Lortel Theatre, the show has moved to Broadway, where it opened this month to rapturous reviews. Last week, Oh, Mary! grossed $1,054,998—an all-time record for the Lyceum Theatre, which has been operating since 1903. The run was originally scheduled to end in September; it has just extended through November.
Out of nowhere, it seemed, Escola has suddenly been everywhere, bringing their estimable spark to late-night talk shows, The View and even the Met Gala. Like most overnight successes, this one has been a long time coming: Fans of downtown comedy and alt-cabaret have known for years that Escola is a special talent. (“Blending boyish mischief with dizzy charm and the ruthless twinkle of a starlet bent on fame, Escola’s comic persona suggests a street urchin raised by the gang from The Match Game,” we wrote more than a decade ago.) It was just a matter of time until the world caught on, and it finally has.
But why now? Oh, Mary! doesn’t follow the template for most Broadway plays these days. It’s a modest production of an original work with no big-name actors and a zany premise. It’s a smash for one reason: It’s stone-cold hilarious. As I wrote in my review, “I can’t remember the last time I saw a play that made me laugh, helplessly and loudly, as much as Oh, Mary! did—and my reaction was shared by the rest of the audience, which burst into applause at the end of every scene.”
In short: Oh, Mary! is fun. It has nothing to teach about history—if anything, you may leave knowing less than when you came in—and it doesn’t have a message. It just entertains, and entertains very well. Sometimes, as an audience, that’s what you want, and comedies benefit from having a big live audience, especially hard comedies like Oh, Mary! The waves of delight that crash through the Lyceum sweep you up in the joy of being part of a happy crowd. It’s a collective high.
Fun, for lack of a better word, is good. Fun is right. Fun works. And fun is too rare on Broadway. Successful nonmusical comedies were once common on the Great White Way, but they don’t pop up very often now, and even musicals tend to be short on mirth. Perhaps it is because theater has become so expensive that shows feel they need to be Very Important and Life-Changing Events. But money should also be able to buy you—as Sweet Charity‘s taxi dancers sing in “Big Spender”—”Fun! Laughs! Good times!” And even as Broadway continues to bend toward seriousness—Nazis featured prominently in five shows last season!—there are signs throughout the city that fun is making a comeback.
Consider the unsinkable Off Broadway musical Titanique, which debuted in 2022 at the crowded Asylum Theatre and is still going strong at Union Square’s giant Daryl Roth Theatre. The show is a total goof: a send-up of James Cameron’s 1997 romantic disaster film, narrated intrusively by Celine Dion and punctuated with songs from the Québécois nightingale’s catalog of hits. The script—by original stars Marla Mindelle and Constantine Rousouli and director Tye Blue—is not as tight as Oh, Mary!’s; some of the jokes are groaners. But that’s part of its scrappy appeal to the merry spectators that come each night to have a few drinks and revisit the 1910s by way of the 1990s.
Consider, too, the shocking success of Cats: The Jellicle Ball, which takes a musical that had become a punchline—Andrew Lloyd Webber’s setting of cute cat-themed poems by T.S. Eliot—and makes it a triumph. Audiences at the Perelman Arts Center are losing their minds over this production, as well they should. Directors Zhailon Levingston and Bill Rauch give the show a comprehensive makeover, reimagining it as a ballroom runway competition. (I called it Paris Is Purring.) Voguing their tails off and decked out in pussy-realness ensembles, the cast serves attitude—cattitude?—for days. Yes, it’s still a show about singing and dancing cats. But now it’s fabulous.
And then there is Queen of Hearts, the latest outrageous spectacle from Austin McCormick’s Bushwick dance-burlesque troupe Company XIV. I wrote a profile of the company last year for their annual holiday extravaganza, Nutcracker Rouge, and this show is every bit as good: a dazzling collection of dances, songs and speciality circus acts inspired by the Alice in Wonderland books. It’s sexy and silly, sublime and ridiculous, and Zane Pihlstrom’s baroquely ornate costumes are a marvel. The audience is young, hip and thrilled to be out on the town at an event that feels like a classic New York City adventure. As Raven Snook put it in her review, “Queen of Hearts feels like Moulin Rouge! for actual bohemians.”
One thing these four shows have in common is a central queer sensibility, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence. What they indicate, perhaps, is a movement away from the heaviness that a lot of queer theater took on in recent decades—in response to AIDS and the general fight for equality—and back toward camp: the fantastical, the exuberant, the unserious, the absurd. “Camp is generous. It wants to enjoy,” wrote Susan Sontag in “Notes on ‘Camp,’” her influential 1964 essay. “It neutralizes moral indignation, sponsors playfulness.”
Of course, that doesn’t mean that only camp shows can be fun, but this is one area where queer artists can perhaps lead the way. American musical comedy had been moribund for nearly 20 years in 2001 when Mel Brooks and Thomas Meehan brought it back from near-death with The Producers. The runaway success of that show made actual producers and writers realize that there was a major untapped market for a good time at the theater, and major coin to be made. I hope the success of Oh, Mary! will likewise inspire writers with unique and modern comic styles, like Escola’s, to try their hands at creating nonmusical comedies for the stage. In these tense times, we need more laughter. If nothing else, as Oh, Mary! has taught us, it’s what Mary Todd Lincoln would have wanted.
