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The Sublime, Stupid World of ‘Oh, Mary!,’ Cole Escola’s Surprise Broadway Hit

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The Sublime, Stupid World of ‘Oh, Mary!,’ Cole Escola’s Surprise Broadway Hit

A collage showing Cole Escola as Mary Todd Lincoln, historical photos of Mary Todd Lincoln, and other ephemera.

“Oh, Mary!” is the surprise hit of the current Broadway season: an outlandish comedy with an insistently ahistorical premise, depicting Mary Todd Lincoln as a self-involved alcoholic who dreams of becoming a cabaret star.

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Cole Escola in a clip from “Pee Pee Manor.”

The show is the brainchild of Cole Escola, an alt-cabaret performer who, through years of gender-bending sketches on YouTube and onstage, honed the parodic sensibility that informs “Oh, Mary!”

An old photograph of of Mary Todd Lincoln.

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The show’s central element is, of course, Mary herself — a warped version of the onetime first lady. Escola, who wrote the show and stars as Mary, created a character who is somehow both serious and ridiculous.

Escola as Mary, wearing a black gown and curls.

So how did the show’s creative team decide what “Oh, Mary!” should look like? Escola had some ideas.

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A sketch of the black dress costume.

Escola envisioned Mary’s main gown as heavy and black, her curls bouncy and absurd. “I wanted everything to move and to be fun to play with, but I also wanted it to look like she’s trapped,” Escola said.

The black moire dress, inspired by portraits of, and museum exhibitions about, Mary Todd Lincoln, is bell-shaped, with large puffy sleeves and a pointed bodice; the buttons are exaggerated and the trim is outsized. It “alludes to her inner story of having been a cabaret legend,” said Holly Pierson, the costume designer.

Escola on the stage floor in the black gown.

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As the show developed, the dress was shortened, because the more historically accurate floor-length version was causing Escola to trip. “The shortness was necessary for Cole to run around and jump on the desk and do all the stuff on the floor,” Pierson said.

Escola’s bloomers alongside the similar bloomers worn by the queen in the “Alice in Wonderland” cartoon.

The undergarments, which include black tights, white bloomers painted with red hearts, and a ruffled hoop skirt, had to be redesigned several times to make them about five pounds lighter, because the original version was so heavy it impeded Escola’s choreographed movement.

Mary’s hair, a dark brown long bob adorned with curls, is the creation of Leah Loukas, a veteran wig designer. Loukas said the severity of the wig, and its center part, is based on historical images.

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A still from “Gone With the Wind” of Aunt Pittypat with her many curls.

The curls, which bounce as Escola flounces, are inspired by characters including Aunt Pittypat in “Gone With the Wind” …

A still from “Cinderella.”

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… an evil stepsister in “Cinderella,” and a poetry book Loukas had from her own childhood.

A black and white drawing of a girl with curly hair, alongside a gif of Escola flipping their curls.

The number of curls increased as the show transferred to Broadway from downtown and the creative team decided to play up the absurdity, but striking the right balance — the quantity and bounce of the curls that would move but not obscure Escola’s face — required time and testing.

“It took us months to find the magical sweet spot of comedy and functionality,” Loukas said.

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A collage of Escola as Mary, surrounded by old Hollywood actresses.

Escola is a huge fan of old movies and the actresses who starred in them.

Margaret Sullavan

Barbara Stanwyck, and more.

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A clip from “The Heiress.”

Especially influential is “The Heiress,” a 1949 film adapted from Henry James’s “Washington Square,” with an Oscar-winning turn by Olivia de Havilland.

“It’s thematically similar,” Escola said: “A woman who doesn’t fit the role she’s supposed to play, and who may or may not be conspired against by the people who are supposed to love her the most.”

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A collage of Escola as Mary, surrounded by old Hollywood actresses.

“They’re all ingredients in me, and I’m an ingredient in Mary, so there’s just Old Hollywood microplastics throughout the DNA of my Mary Todd Lincoln,” Escola said.

A collage of Escola being held by another character in the play, surrounded by similar embraces from old movies and the cover of a romance novel.

The sets and the staging are informed by a nostalgia for classic cinematic imagery. “Old American tropes are a signature piece of Cole’s work,” said Andrew Moerdyk, one of the scenic designers.

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For example, the brief clutch between Mary and her acting teacher looks like the cover of a romance novel, or a scene from a romantic movie.

A clip from “Gone With the Wind.”

“I’m of course inspired by romance in old movies, whether it’s Scarlett and Rhett or Heathcliff and Cathy,” Escola said, referring to the romantic couplings at the heart of “Gone With the Wind” and “Wuthering Heights.”

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A design mock-up of the saloon set alongside a photo of the real set.

A bar where the Lincolns go to drink looks like a saloon from an old western, with its dark wood and swinging door. Nobody worried about what a bar near the White House actually might have looked like in the 1860s.

An old photo of people drinking in a saloon.

“We looked at Victorian saloons of the period from all over America, and they had this beautiful heavy woodwork, and usually had a mirror,” Moerdyk added. “We wanted to distill it down to the essence of what a saloon was.”

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Silly props from the saloon set.

The set was created by the design collective dots. Moerdyk described the tone as “rigorously stupid.” “Usually we go to great lengths to mask the tops of walls and erase anything phony, but here we leaned into the theateriness of it all,” he said.

A design mockup of the White House office set for the play, alongside the real set.

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The show’s set is meant to be reminiscent of community theater — more stagey than naturalistic, so that when you look at it, you know you’re seeing actors in a play.

The White House office, for example, has two doors on the same side of the room to facilitate actor entrances and exits; the walls are angled to make it easier for audiences on the side of the theater to see.

Zooming in on the two sets of doors.

“That office makes zero sense architecturally — it just looks like a set, and that was intentional,” Sam Pinkleton, the show’s director, said. “Everything is cheated so that the audience can see it.”

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“The directive was, ‘You are not designing a play. You are playing designers designing a play,’” Escola said.

“It’s sort of the straight man to the comedy of the writing. The walls move every time we slam a door, but it’s not a ‘Ha ha, look at this set,’ it’s more ‘Look at how seriously we were taking this play with our limited resources.’ It’s literally the backdrop for the comedy.”

“The books on the shelves are painted spines that are totally flat, and you can see from the side that there are no books there,” Moerdyk said.

“We would never do that usually, but it was really fun to be allowed to be stupid.”

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A collage of the saloon bar with the R U M bottles.

Another example: “The labeling is the most basic version of what a prop would be,” Moerdyk said. “Downtown we didn’t spend any time thinking about what the liquors would be — we just wrote the word ‘Rum’ and ‘Whiskey’ on bottles and stacked them.

“And when we moved to Broadway, we needed to make that idea register to the back of the house, so we ended up labeling them ‘R’ and ‘U’ and ‘M.’ We had a lot of fun thinking about, ‘What is the dumbest version of this idea, and how can we make it be funny?’”

As the show developed, the creative team leaned into the set’s humor. “When we started there were some things that felt too underplayed or muted or naturalistic, like, ‘Oopsie, we’re doing Chekhov,’” Pinkleton said. Instead, he said, the show works best when “everything is taken a step too far.”

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A collage of Escola as Mary, with the Lincoln character, surrounded by reference images of the Lincoln assassination.

The show’s aesthetics get more precise as the story progresses.

An old drawing of the assassination.

For the assassination scene at Ford’s Theater, the designers opted for a greater degree of verisimilitude, imagining that some in the audience would have fairly specific expectations for what that would look like from photographs and paintings depicting the scene.

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“We wanted it to be the punchiest, most recognizable, easy-to-clock symbol of Ford’s Theater,” Moerdyk said.

A design mockup of the theater booth set alongside the real set.

“We tried versions that were high concept, but then Sam said, ‘What if we just put the booth in the middle of the stage, surrounded by darkness,’ and the image of that booth in the dark void is so successful.”

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A collage of Escola as Mary, wearing a blue dress, surrounded by a costume sketch, swatches, and an old drawing.

The blue dress that Mary Todd Lincoln wears in the assassination scene is a good example of how the show’s designers put their own spin on history, informed by midcentury film aesthetics.

Mary Todd Lincoln did have a blue velvet dress, but it’s not what she wore that fateful night, and it wasn’t as vibrant as the outfit in the show.

“Ours is a little more bright and in your face,” said Pierson, the costume designer. “We wanted it to be this empowerment dress — brash and almost tacky.”

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The full moodboard collage.

The show’s design winds up as both a homage and a spoof, made by people who love theater and also laugh about it.

Pinkleton, the director, summed up the approach, saying, “We wanted the whole thing to be a warm embrace of doing a play.”

Cole Escola is scheduled to star in “Oh, Mary!” until Jan. 19, and then Betty Gilpin will step into the title role for eight weeks. Tickets for the show are on sale through June 28; the production has not said who will play Mary Todd Lincoln following Gilpin.

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New York Rescuers Break the Ice to Save Moose From a Frozen Lake

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New York Rescuers Break the Ice to Save Moose From a Frozen Lake

So what do you do if you find a 1,000-pound moose stuck in a partly frozen lake in the center of a six-million-acre wilderness?

When rescuers arrived at Lake Abanakee in Northern New York, only the head of the moose was above the water. It had fallen through about 40 minutes earlier, and was spotted by an unidentified bystander in the vast forests of the Adirondacks.

The moose, a male that had shed its antlers, had walked about 200 feet onto the lake in Indian Lake, about 100 miles northwest of Albany, before falling into the frigid waters late on Thursday morning, according to the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation.

The rescuers saw that the moose was unable to get out of the water. An airboat, a flat-bottomed watercraft with a propeller, was on its way to help.

“I guess there’s no training manual for getting moose out of the ice,” Lt. Robert Higgins, a state environmental conservation officer, said with a chuckle later in an interview posted on the agency’s website.

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He narrated the rescue like it was all in a day’s work, as if anyone would quickly dress in cold-water gear and venture onto a frozen lake with sleds and heavy chain saws, as the team had done.

“We knew that time wasn’t on our side,” Evan Nahor, a forest ranger, said in the interview. “It was, ‘Do what we can with what we have.’”

The airboat had not yet arrived, so the rescuers walked onto the ice, using a spud bar, which is a long, metal tool with a chisel on one end, to find the most solid path to the moose.

“Every minute counts,” Lieutenant Higgins said of the rescue.

They weren’t worried, they said, about needing to be saved themselves if they fell through. Their dry suits would keep them warm and afloat and their safety ropes would be used to pull each other out.

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Kneeling on sleds — to spread out their weight across the ice — they began using a chain saw to remove sections of ice and pushing them away to open a channel to the shore.

The video shows the crew attacking the ice surrounding the moose as it calmly treaded water — maybe a little too calmly.

“We tried poking it with a couple of different things, but it didn’t seem afraid of them,” said another forest ranger, Matt Savarie. “So, finally, we pushed the jet sleds that we had up close to it. And for whatever reason, it was scared of those. So once we got behind it, we were able to direct it.”

The bull moose, which can weigh around 1,000 pounds, paddled briskly through the narrow channel and made it to shore. By then it had been in the water for about two hours.

“It was really tired,” Lieutenant Higgins said. “It was shivering. It just didn’t have much energy left. We didn’t know if it was going to be able to stand up or not.”

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It took about 15 minutes for the moose to find its footing and strength. “It tried a few times and eventually it stood up,” Lieutenant Higgins said.

Then it shook off the ice and took an easy stride on a different path, into the forest.

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David Schneiderman, Village Voice Editor and Publisher, Dies at 77

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David Schneiderman, Village Voice Editor and Publisher, Dies at 77

David Schneiderman, an editor turned publisher turned chief executive of The Village Voice, the granddaddy of alternative newspapers, whose 28-year tenure ran from its era of downtown-bestriding indispensability to a long, slow fade in the internet era, died on Friday in Edmonds, Wash., near Seattle. He was 77.

His daughter, Kate Schneiderman, said the cause of his death, in a hospital, was pneumonia brought on by chronic lymphocytic leukemia, with which he was diagnosed two years ago. He lived in Woodway, Wash.

After being named editor in chief in 1978, Mr. Schneiderman elevated The Voice’s journalistic game, diversified a newsroom that was nearly all white and all male, and reckoned with an increasingly competitive landscape in which traditional newspapers and magazines imitated The Voice’s cutting-edge cultural and media coverage, as well as its insouciant tone.

His own hiring by Rupert Murdoch, who bought The Voice in 1977, added a chapter to the paper’s famous anti-establishment culture.

The staff vowed in a statement to refuse to work “for any new editor imposed on us in secret and without warning by the management.” Mr. Schneiderman could not take up his job for months until his predecessor’s contract expired. The staff backed down from its threat.

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He entered the faction-ridden newsroom on 11th Street and University Place, where journalists defended their right to inject opinion into their copy and to refuse editing, as a coat-and-tie-wearing former editor of The New York Times, a favorite Voice foil.

He brought an easygoing, slightly bemused temperament that defused tensions; more important, he had a commitment to strong journalism.

“People fairly quickly found out that he was not what we had sort of stereotypically assumed he’d be, coming from The Times, and that he actually had a lot of good ideas and was a serious person and really good journalist,” Joe Conason, a Voice investigative reporter in the 1980s, said in an interview.

Mr. Schneiderman enhanced The Voice’s commitment to reporting. He hired Wayne Barrett, who investigated a real estate developer few took seriously, Donald J. Trump, and Teresa Carpenter, a crime reporter who in 1981 won The Voice its first Pulitzer Prize. He also fended off Mr. Murdoch, who wanted Mr. Conason’s wings clipped for writing critically and regularly about him.

“There was a layer of professionalism that got brought into The Voice that some of the people from the ’60s and ’70s didn’t like,” Tricia Romano, a former Voice writer who last year published an oral history of the paper, “The Freaks Came Out to Write,” said in an interview.

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“He was very good at just connecting with people and navigating all the craziness,” she added.

Mr. Schneiderman’s agenda included diversifying The Voice. He named women as senior editors and made the paper a launchpad for young Black writers: He supported giving the music and culture critic Stanley Crouch a column and hired the writer Thulani Davis (later an opera librettist). Under him, the paper printed its first gay pride issue in 1979.

Mr. Schneiderman also fired Alexander Cockburn, a strong critic of Israel, for accepting $10,000 from the Institute of Arab Studies, a research group, for a book on the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Mr. Cockburn, he said, had “damaged the credibility” of The Voice.

Under a new owner, Leonard N. Stern, a pet food and real estate mogul who bought The Voice in 1985, Mr. Schneiderman ascended to the job of publisher. He appointed Karen Durbin, a former arts editor, as the paper’s second woman editor in chief in 1994, a decision that aggravated the divide between hard-news reporters and cultural writers. Mr. Barrett, according to the oral history, wore a dress to the office the week Ms. Durbin took over.

Mr. Schneiderman pushed the paper to grow beyond its countercultural heritage and strident left-wing politics as its core readership grew older and more prosperous. Many on the staff — influential critics and columnists, who embraced the view that inmates should run the asylum — pulled in the opposite direction, fearful that The Voice would lose its edge.

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In 1988 Mr. Schneiderman and Mr. Stern launched a tabloid weekly, 7 Days, an uptown alter ego to The Voice, with entertainment listings and deftly written takes on New York trends and scenes. It was a buzzy success, but two years later it ended its run for lack of advertising.

Competition from other New York weeklies with entertainment listings, including Time Out New York, ate into The Voice’s circulation even as traditional publications, including The Times’s arts and style sections, swiped pieces of its downtown DNA.

Moribund circulation and revenues at The Voice led to a once-unthinkable move: The $1.25 newsstand price was eliminated, and the paper became free in 1996.

“One of the negative aspects of The Voice over the past few years is that it has sort of self-ghettoized itself and lost a generation of readers,” Jules Feiffer, the Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist who contributed to the paper beginning in the 1950s, told The Times in 1996.

Moving to a giveaway model was a boon to circulation, which had more than doubled to 250,000 by 1999, and the paper said the increased advertising more than made up for lost revenue.

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Mr. Stern — with input from Mr. Schneiderman, who was named president of Mr. Stern’s VV Publishing Corporation in 1988 — acquired other alternative papers, first L.A. Weekly in 1994 and later papers in Seattle, Nashville and the Twin Cities.

But with the advent of Craigslist, the free online portal for classified ads — the source of half The Voice’s revenue — Mr. Stern saw the writing on the wall and abruptly decided to sell.

“The minute Craigslist came to the city, literally within a few weeks, our ads — it was slow. Then it stopped growing and it never grew again,” Mr. Schneiderman told Ms. Romano for her oral history.

In 2000, the seven-paper chain, including the flagship Voice, was bought by a group of investors. They installed Mr. Schneiderman as chief executive, with a small equity stake, in a new company, Village Voice Media.

The company merged in 2005 with the New Times Group, a rival chain of alt-weeklies that Mr. Schneiderman had once disparaged for slashing staff at papers it acquired. Mr. Schneiderman was put in charge of exploring online opportunities for New Times. But he resigned a year later.

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“I remember sitting in a meeting in my conference room, and I was suddenly inconsequential,” he was quoted as saying in the oral history. “I was like a potted plant.”

David Abbot Schneiderman was born on April 14, 1947, in Manhattan, the younger of two sons of Robert D. Schneiderman and Mary (Torres) Schneiderman. His father was a children’s wear salesman who later retired from the Izod company. His mother was an executive assistant at J.C. Penney. David grew up in the Long Island suburbs of Hewlett and Roslyn.

He received a bachelor’s degree in 1969 and a master’s degree in international studies in 1970 from Johns Hopkins University.

He was hired by The Times that year as an assistant editor on the newly created Op-Ed page, a collection of opinion columns that ran opposite the editorials.

His marriage to Peggy Rosenthal ended in divorce. In 2006 he married Dana Faust, the managing director of advertising for The Times at its Seattle sales office.

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She and Ms. Schneiderman, his daughter from his first marriage, survive him, as do a stepson, Benjamin Drachler; a stepdaughter, Madeline Drachler; four grandchildren; and his brother, Stuart Schneiderman.

After resigning from The Voice, Mr. Schneiderman commuted from his home near Seattle to San Francisco, where he was an executive of a corporate communications firm, Abernathy MacGregor Group (now H/Advisors Abernathy). He retired in 2016.

Two years later, The Voice, which had ceased publishing in print and appeared only online, went out of business in its 63rd year. Its full-time staff by that time had shrunk to a mere 18 people.

“Newmark did destroy newspapers,” Mr. Schneiderman said of Craig Newmark, the founder of Craigslist, in the oral history. “There’s no two ways about it.”

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Adams Accuses Former Prosecutor of Bringing Case to Help His Own Career

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Adams Accuses Former Prosecutor of Bringing Case to Help His Own Career

A day after Mayor Eric Adams visited President-elect Donald J. Trump in Florida, his lawyer filed court papers in the mayor’s federal corruption case arguing that the former prosecutor who brought the case was trying to advance his own political career.

The lawyer, Alex Spiro, wrote a letter on Saturday to the judge overseeing the case, arguing that a recent opinion article by the former prosecutor, Damian Williams, could prejudice the jury pool against Mr. Adams and was part of Mr. Williams’s plan to run for mayor or another political office.

“The conclusion here is inevitable,” Mr. Spiro said. “Mr. Williams brought a meritless case against a political rival to bolster his own immediate candidacy for office, potentially including mayor of New York.”

Mr. Williams announced the indictment against Mr. Adams in September, when he was the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York; he resigned in mid-December. He argued in the opinion article, published last week in City & State, that the city was in “deep crisis” and was “being led with a broken ethical compass.”

The piece did not directly mention the prosecution of Mr. Adams. But its publication, along with a new website highlighting Mr. Williams’s achievements, got New York’s political world buzzing, with some wondering whether he might run for office, most likely governor.

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Mr. Williams did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Nicholas Biase, a spokesman for the Southern District, declined to comment.

Mr. Adams, a Democrat, is running for a second term in a competitive primary in June. He is set to go on trial in April on charges of bribery and fraud. He has insisted that he is innocent and has pleaded not guilty.

Mr. Trump has said that he is considering offering a pardon to Mr. Adams, arguing that both he and the mayor were “persecuted” by prosectors. The two men had lunch at the Trump International Golf Course in West Palm Beach on Friday; Mr. Adams said they did not discuss his legal case.

Mr. Spiro asked the judge to consider Mr. Williams’s actions as part of the mayor’s efforts to have the case dismissed, and he called for the Department of Justice to open an investigation into whether the mayor’s prosecution had been brought for improper purposes.

Mr. Spiro argued that the “taint on the jury pool is irrevocable” and that Mr. Williams had “smeared Mayor Adams’s reputation for his own political benefit.”

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Mr. Williams served as the U.S. attorney for the Southern District from 2021 to 2024 and oversaw many prominent cases, including prosecutions against the former New Jersey senator Robert Menendez and the rapper Sean Combs. Before he was appointed to the post by President Biden, he served as an assistant U.S. attorney in the office for nine years, leading the securities fraud unit for part of that time. He announced recently that he would join the law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison as a partner in the litigation department.

Mr. Trump has picked Jay Clayton, the top Wall Street enforcer during his first administration, to replace Mr. Williams. Mr. Clayton still must be confirmed by the Senate.

Benjamin Weiser and William K. Rashbaum contributed reporting.

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