Just what the world was waiting for! An X-rated alternative-fact-based sitcom leading up to Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln’s fatal night at Ford’s Theatre. Yet in the space of five months, Cole Escola’s 80-minute Oh, Mary! rated not one but two coveted New York Times “Critic’s Pick” spots. “So stupid. So campy. So unexpected. And yes, like Mrs. Lincoln, even sensational.” So said a raving Joshua Barone, whose usual beat is classical music, in February 2024, when Escola’s magnum opus was packing them in Off Broadway. In July, it transferred to Broadway like the Second Coming of Hamilton, and the paper’s chief drama critic Jesse Green took his shot. “‘Stupid,’” Green wrote. “I think not.” Rather, he opined, Oh, Mary! is “one of the best crafted and most exactingly directed Broadway comedies in years.” Yes, it’s quite the cuckoo clockwork, what with its First Lady heroine who craves the cabaret spotlight the way Audrey II craves fresh human blood in Little Shop of Horrors, and her closeted husband who gives up sodomy as easily and often as W.C. Fields gave up drinking. A vehicle custom-built to the playwright’s screwball talents as a comic and artiste, Oh, Mary! promised to collapse under its own weightlessness when Escola decamped early in the new year. Yet on January 21, when Betty Gilpin (of Glow and American Primeval fame) applied five-o’clock shadow to her porcelain cheek for an eight-week engagement as Mary, there was still plenty of gas in the tank. Tituss Burgess—whose credits include The Little Mermaid on Broadway (he sang “Under the Sea”), the Dreamgirls showstopper “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going” at a Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS fundraiser, and The Witch in a Miami revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods—has Mary on his song-and-dance card for three weeks beginning March 18. On April 8, it’s back to basics (ha!) with Escola and the entire sensational Broadway cast for the sensational farewell season, through June 28, barring extensions. —Matthew Gurewitsch