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 its held up with cameos by Maya Rudolph and Megan Stalter, and even had time to make it to the West End. On July 20, it’s back to basics (ha!) with Escola returning to their magnificent role in London. —Matthew Gurewitsch