Oh, Mary! (Touring)

Fifteen years before anyone wrote it down

Cole Escola was born on 25 November 1986 in Clatskanie, a small town in north-west Oregon, and moved to New York to perform. The route up was not a conventional one: self-funded, semi-scripted YouTube sketches made with the comedian Jeffery Self, then supporting parts in Difficult People and At Home with Amy Sedaris, then solo shows at Joe's Pub downtown. Conrad Ricamora, who would later play Abraham Lincoln opposite Escola, has said he was already watching those home-made videos more than a decade before the two ever shared a stage.

The premise of Oh, Mary! — Mary Todd Lincoln as a suffocated alcoholic who wants to go back to cabaret, married to a closeted president — sat unwritten for roughly fifteen years. Escola has described the gap between having the idea and actually producing a script as the long part of the story, which makes the eventual speed of the thing more striking: from a downtown 199-seat house to a Tony Award for Best Leading Actor in a Play in under eighteen months.

Lucille Lortel to the Lyceum

Oh, Mary! opened off-Broadway at the Lucille Lortel Theatre on 8 February 2024, extended twice on demand and closed there on 12 May 2024. It transferred to Broadway's Lyceum Theatre, opening on 11 July 2024 — Escola's Broadway debut as both playwright and performer, with Ricamora as the President, Bianca Leigh as Mary's Chaperone, James Scully and Tony Macht completing a five-hander.

What followed was unusual for a new play by a first-time Broadway writer. It became the first production in the Lyceum's 121-year history to take more than a million dollars in a single week. At the 2025 Tony Awards it won Best Direction of a Play for Sam Pinkleton and Best Leading Actor in a Play for Escola, who became the first openly non-binary winner in that category. It was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, took the Drama League awards for Outstanding Play and Outstanding Direction, and picked up a special citation from the New York Drama Critics' Circle.

The critical line on it has been consistent about the discipline underneath the silliness — one reviewer called it among the best-crafted and most exactingly directed Broadway comedies in years — which matters for a touring version, because the joke architecture is the asset, not any one performance.

The part became a relay

Once Escola stepped out of the Lyceum company, Mary Todd Lincoln turned into a rotating guest role, and the casting has functioned as the show's renewal mechanism. Betty Gilpin and Tituss Burgess took it first, then Jinkx Monsoon, Jane Krakowski, John Cameron Mitchell, Maya Rudolph and Megan Stalter, who played through 12 September 2026. Monsoon came back for a second stint of 30 performances from 8 January to 1 February 2026.

Bowen Yang joined the Broadway company on 15 September 2026 for a twelve-week engagement through 6 December 2026, his Broadway debut, describing it as the best debut a cis gay man with limited singing ability could ask for. So the Lyceum production is still running at the point the tour begins — the two are playing in parallel rather than one succeeding the other.

London got its own version at the Trafalgar Theatre from 18 December 2025, with Mason Alexander Park as Mary. It won the 2026 Laurence Olivier Award for Best Entertainment or Comedy Play, and in May 2026 it was announced that Escola would make their West End debut in the role, with the London booking extended.

A tour cast by the calendar

Producers announced the North American tour in January 2026, and the full route followed on 29 April 2026: eighteen engagements, from Hartford in September 2026 to West Palm Beach in May 2027, taking in San Diego, Las Vegas, San Francisco, Seattle, Los Angeles, Boston, Saint Paul, Chicago, Washington DC, Detroit, Philadelphia, Charlotte, Cleveland, Tampa and Houston. Several are sit-downs rather than week-long stops — four weeks at the Ahmanson in Los Angeles from 10 November 2026, three at the Curran in San Francisco, three at the CIBC in Chicago.

Casting was confirmed on 30 July 2026 and is built as a swap. Alaska plays Mary Todd Lincoln from the 19 September 2026 opening to 17 January 2027, with J. Harrison Ghee as Mary's Husband; from 19 January 2027 Ghee takes over as Mary through to 16 May 2027. Ghee called the chance at both roles a dream, and Alaska noted being the first Mary to wear the hoop skirt in Las Vegas, an accolade expected to reach the obituary.

That plan was disrupted before the first performance. Ghee took a leave of absence from 17 September 2026 through 1 November 2026 on medical advice, so the President is being played by the Tony nominee John-Andrew Morrison, who has performed the role on Broadway opposite several different Marys. The rest of the touring company is Wesley Taylor as Mary's Teacher, Pooya Mohseni as Mary's Chaperone and Michael Lepore as Mary's Husband's Assistant, with Natalie Joy Johnson, Mike Cefalo and Julius Thomas III also in the company.

Pinkleton directs the tour, and the original design team came with it: scenery by dots, costumes by Holly Pierson, lighting by Cha See, sound and original music by Daniel Kluger, wigs by Leah J. Loukas, props supervised by Addison Heeren.

Eighty minutes, no interval

The tour teched and opened at the Bushnell's Belding Theater in Hartford, playing 19 to 23 September 2026, with tickets from $69 to $208.50. Reviewing on 21 September, Christopher Arnott of the Hartford Courant reckoned the tour premiere lived up to the hype, and located the comic dialect somewhere between vaudeville, burlesque, Drunk History and Warner Brothers cartoons — a Civil War White House and a saloon, slapstick, and dialogue that keeps swerving away from period register.

On Alaska, the review credits real physical control and hand work, finds genuine grace and beauty in the performance, and rates the Mary riveting for reasons beyond the comedy. The show ends in a madcap musical fantasy sequence. The whole thing runs 80 minutes straight through.

Where it stands this week

As of 29 September 2026 the tour has finished Hartford and moved to the San Diego Civic Theatre for a run to 4 October 2026, with Las Vegas from 6 October and the long San Francisco sit-down from 13 October. Ghee is due back in the company from early November, which puts the swap into the Mary role on course for Chicago in January 2027.

Meanwhile Escola's own trajectory has moved past the play: voicing Bon Clay in the third season of Netflix's One Piece, and a Miss Piggy film alongside Emma Stone and Jennifer Lawrence. The tour is the first time the piece has had to work at scale in 2,000-plus-seat rooms, away from both its author and the intimacy of the Lyceum — and on the Hartford evidence it does.