The ability to execute slapstick and physical comedy brilliantly may be reserved for true greats like Buster Keaton or Lucille Ball. Oh, Mary! —by playwright, Cole Escola, recently transferred from Broadway where it won two Tony awards— leans heavily on shtick and physicality. Unfortunately, the cast is unable to muster the precision or comic timing needed to elevate the evening beyond a campy, overwrought burlesque. The plot is too thin to sustain much farcical traction, and so the play never settles into a successful comic rhythm.
There are moments of cleverness but the overall premise is stretched to the point of exhaustion. Mary is played by Mason Alexander Park, who brings a strong vocal range and plenty of energy. Mary is unhappily confined to the White House yet longs for her former life on the cabaret stage. Mary’s husband — an important figure in American history (played, in deliberately transgressive casting, by Giles Terera) — is preoccupied with a nation at war. He indulgently accommodates Mary’s theatrical ambitions, engaging an acting tutor (Dino Fetscher) for her: a young man whose place in American history is also well known, though not yet realised within the world of the play. In Escola’s imagining, Mary’s husband is also struggling, with limited success, to suppress his homosexual desires, particularly those directed toward his assistant (Oliver Stockley). Mary’s friend is the delightful Kate O’Donnell, who appears briefly, and has the better frock.
What the play cannot overcome is its thin narrative. Built almost entirely around Mary’s yearning to return to cabaret, the show relies on the cast’s timing and charisma to provide the weight the writing doesn’t supply, and they simply can’t bridge that gap. The blackout-sketch structure further exposes the problem: the scenes arrive briskly enough, but the jokes simply aren’t there, leaving the evening feeling scattered and only intermittently amusing.
The F-bombs and C-words that are scattered throughout the evening initially land with a kind of mischievous charge, especially coming from mouths 19th-century American icons. There are moments when Park delivers a genuine zinger, or finds a welcome moment of stillness and interiority that hint at something more grounded. Park is particularly strong in a sequence where Mary is forced to improvise as a minor Shakespearean character. And a few of the plot turns involving Mary, her husband, and her tutor are neatly constructed.
I’d like to report that the design elements offered some compensating wit or visual interest, and while the costumes are fun in an overwrought, anarchic way, the set is merely simple—barely sketched in, vaudevillian in its minimalism.
Much of the audience on the night I attended laughed enthusiastically at the broad declamatory style and stood at the end, clearly delighted. It was a response outside my experience. For me, Oh, Mary! was a strained evening that mistook volume for vitality and relied on a premise too flimsy to support the weight placed upon it. Taste will always vary, of course, but on this occasion mine and the production’s were miles apart.
Oh, Mary!
Writer: Cole Escola
Director: Sam Pinkleton
Cast includes: Mason Alexander Park, Giles Terera, Dino Fetscher, Kate O’Donnell, Oliver Stockley
Scenic Designer: dots
Costume Designer: Holly Pierson
Running time: 80 minutes, no interval
Until: 26 April, 2026