Reenactors vs. Broadway: Why ‘Oh, Mary!’ Isn’t the Villain Here

Cole Escola in Oh Mary! (Sara Kruwich/The New York Times)

by Chris Peterson

So yeah, Oh, Mary! is a big glittery middle finger to historical accuracy. But here’s the part everyone seems to be missing: it knows exactly what it’s doing. This isn’t some dusty docudrama with a PBS narrator and a mahogany desk. It’s a drag-infused, whiskey-soaked fever dream. It’s a memory play if the memory came from someone who skimmed a history book while blackout drunk. And that is exactly what makes it thrilling.

Cole Escola(they/them), who wrote and stars in the show, has said it plainly — this version of Mary Todd Lincoln is based on a “third grade understanding” of history. They are not pretending to be some scholarly authority. They are not trying to correct the record. They are creating something new, something dangerous, and something that is honestly more honest than most of the self-important, by-the-book bioplays that grace our stages every Tony season.

This Mary is queer rage and grief and chaos personified. She is over-the-top, unhinged, tragic, campy, and yes, absolutely hilarious. She is a woman coming undone under the weight of societal expectation and public mourning, channeling that pressure into desperate showmanship. And no, she doesn’t act “accurately,” but that’s because she’s not trying to. She’s trying to feel real. And she does.

Now enter the impersonators.

A group of Mary Todd Lincoln reenactors have become the unlikely villains of this story — objecting to the show on the grounds that it presents a historically inaccurate, even disrespectful, portrayal of the former First Lady. And look, I get it. You spend your life crafting lectures and library talks about Mary’s legacy, only for a Broadway play to blow through town and reduce her (in your eyes) to a drunk with eyeliner and jazz hands. That’s got to sting.

But let’s put it into perspective. Laura Keyes, who has performed as Mary for over 15 years, said she’s worried that audiences won’t understand that Oh, Mary! is satire. She called it “dangerously misleading.” Another impersonator, Teena Baldrige, claimed that the play turns Mary into a spectacle, saying, “She was a wife, a mother, and a political force. Not a cabaret act.” Both are featured in The Wall Street Journal piece that essentially serves as the reenactor revolt manifesto.

But here’s my issue: Their outrage is based on the assumption that audiences are dumb. That we can’t tell the difference between farce and fact. That we’ll leave the theater believing Mary Todd Lincoln actually belted torch songs about being ignored by her husband while Abe made assassination jokes. If anything, this show gives Mary a voice, even if that voice is belting through mascara tears.

And let’s not act like Broadway has ever cared about historical accuracy. The moment we put Founding Fathers in ponytails and made them rap, the history train left the station. We have glorified killers (Assassins), anthropomorphized cats (Cats), and reimagined Henry VIII’s wives as Spice Girls (Six). Accuracy is not, and never has been, the mission. The mission is emotion. The mission is connection. And Oh, Mary! delivers both in spades.

The fear from the impersonators is that this Broadway version will tarnish Mary’s legacy. That schoolchildren will now giggle when they hear her name, or that museum docents will get asked about her cabaret career. But let’s be real. Before this show, when was the last time the average person even thought about Mary Todd Lincoln? Cole Escola may have rewritten her, but they also revived her. And that matters.

Plus, Escola’s portrayal, for all its absurdity, comes from a place of real pain. In their New Yorker profile, they talked about processing grief through performance, about being raised queer in a culture that told them to shrink, and about wanting to give Mary a voice that screamed. This isn’t mockery. This is reclamation. And whether you agree with the lens or not, it’s art. And it’s working.

The New York Post called Oh, Mary! “the show nobody saw coming,” praising its originality in a season full of revivals and jukebox fluff. That’s saying something. In a Broadway landscape increasingly shaped by focus groups and intellectual property, Oh, Mary! broke through not because it was safe, but because it wasn’t.

And the best part? Audiences get it. They’re in on the joke. They laugh, they cry, they cheer. They’re not confused about what’s real and what isn’t. They’re choosing to go along for the ride, to live in the fantasy, and to let Mary, this version of her, scream a little louder than history ever let her.

So to the reenactors, I say this with genuine respect: your Mary matters. But so does this one. There’s room for both. History and art don’t need to be at war. One can exist in a museum and the other on a stage. And if anything, they enrich each other. Maybe your Q&A after the battlefield reenactment gets a little more interesting now.

And to Broadway? More of this. Please. More weird, wild, fearless work that doesn’t care if it makes people uncomfortable. More shows that take risks instead of retelling. Because when something like Oh, Mary! comes along, it reminds us what this art form can do. It stirs the pot. It challenges the norms. It opens the door for the next Cole Escola to step in with their own strange, brilliant vision.

Mary Todd Lincoln isn’t rolling over in her grave. She’s rising up from it, eyeliner smudged, drink in hand, ready for her final bow. And honestly? I’d give her a standing ovation.