Olivier awards 2025: full list of winners
Best new musical
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, music and lyrics by Darren Clark, book and lyrics by Jethro Compton at Ambassadors theatre – WINNER!
MJ the Musical, book by Lynn Nottage at Prince Edward theatre
Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812, music, lyrics and book by Dave Malloy at Donmar Warehouse
Why Am I So Single?, music, lyrics and book by Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss at Garrick theatre
Best set designJon Bausor for set design, Toby Olié and Daisy Beattie for puppetry design and Satoshi Kuriyama for projection design for Spirited Away at London Coliseum
Frankie Bradshaw for set design for Ballet Shoes at National Theatre – Olivier
Es Devlin for set design for Coriolanus at National Theatre – OlivierTom Scutt for set design for Fiddler on the Roof at Regent's Park Open Air theatre – WINNER!
Best lighting design
Paule Constable and Ben Jacobs for Oliver! at Gielgud theatre – WINNER!
Howard Hudson for Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812 at Donmar Warehouse
Howard Hudson for Starlight Express at Troubadour Wembley Park theatre
Aideen Malone for Fiddler on the Roof at Regent's Park Open Air theatre
Best new opera productionDuke Bluebeard's Castle by English National Opera at London ColiseumFesten by the Royal Opera at Royal Opera House – WINNER!
L'Olimpiade by Irish National Opera and the Royal Opera at Royal Opera House
The Tales of Hoffmann by the Royal Opera at Royal Opera House
Outstanding achievement in operaAigul Akhmetshina for her performance in Carmen at Royal Opera HouseAllan Clayton for his performance in Festen at Royal Opera House – WINNER!
Jung Young-doo for his direction of Lear at Barbican theatre
Best family show
Brainiac Live at Marylebone theatre – WINNER!
Maddie Moate's Very Curious Christmas at Apollo theatre
The Nutcracker at Polka theatre
Rough Magic at Shakespeare's Globe – Sam Wanamaker Playhouse
Best new production in affiliate theatreAnimal Farm at Theatre Royal Stratford East by George Orwell, adapted by Tatty HennessyBoys on the Verge of Tears by Sam Grabiner at Soho theatre – WINNER!
English by Sanaz Toossi at Kiln theatre
Now, I See by Lanre Malaolu at Theatre Royal Stratford East
What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank by Nathan Englander at Marylebone theatre
Best new dance production
Assembly Hall by Kidd Pivot, Crystal Pite and Jonathon Young at Sadler's Wells – WINNER!
Frontiers: Choreographers of Canada – Pite/Kudelka/Portner by the National Ballet of Canada at Sadler's Wells
Theatre of Dreams by Hofesh Shechter Company at Sadler's Wells
An Untitled Love by A.I.M by Kyle Abraham at Sadler's Wells
Outstanding achievement in danceSarah Chun for her performance in Three Short Ballets at Royal Opera House – Linbury theatre
Tom Visser for his lighting design of Angels' Atlas as part of Frontiers: Choreographers of Canada – Pite/Kudelka/Portner at Sadler's WellsEva Yerbabuena for her performance in Yerbagüena at Sadler's Wells – WINNER!
Best actor in a supporting roleJorge Bosch for Kyoto at @sohoplace
Tom Edden for Waiting for Godot at Theatre Royal HaymarketElliot Levey for Giant at Jerwood theatre Downstairs at Royal Court theatre – WINNER!
Ben Whishaw for Bluets at Jerwood theatre Downstairs at Royal Court theatre
Best actress in a supporting roleSharon D Clarke for The Importance of Being Earnest at National Theatre – Lyttelton
Romola Garai for Giant at Jerwood theatre Downstairs at Royal Court theatreRomola Garai for The Years at Almeida theatre and Harold Pinter theatre – WINNER!
Gina McKee for The Years at Almeida Theatre and Harold Pinter theatre
Best theatre choreographerMatthew Bourne for Oliver! at Gielgud theatre
Julia Cheng for Fiddler on the Roof at Regent's Park Open Air theatre
Hofesh Shechter for Oedipus at the Old VicChristopher Wheeldon for MJ the Musical at Prince Edward theatre – WINNER!
Best costume designHugh Durrant for Robin Hood at the London Palladium
Sachiko Nakahara for Spirited Away at London Coliseum
Tom Scutt for Fiddler on the Roof at Regent's Park Open Air theatreGabriella Slade for Starlight Express at Troubadour Wembley Park theatre – WINNER!
Best sound design
Nick Lidster for Fiddler on the Roof at Regent's Park Open Air theatre – WINNER!
Christopher Shutt for Oedipus at the Old Vic
Thijs van Vuure for The Years at Almeida theatre and Harold Pinter theatre
Koichi Yamamoto for Spirited Away at London Coliseum
Outstanding musical contributionMark Aspinall for musical supervision and additional orchestrations for Fiddler on the Roof at Regent's Park Open Air theatreDarren Clark for music supervision, orchestrations and arrangements and Mark Aspinall for musical direction, music supervision, orchestrations and arrangements for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button at Ambassadors theatre – WINNER!
Dave Malloy for orchestrations and Nicholas Skilbeck for musical supervision for Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812 at Donmar Warehouse
Asaf Zohar for compositions and Gavin Sutherland for dance arrangements and orchestration for Ballet Shoes at National Theatre – Olivier
Best actress in a supporting role in a musicalLiv Andrusier for Fiddler on the Roof at Regent's Park Open Air theatre
Amy Di Bartolomeo for The Devil Wears Prada at Dominion theatre
Beverley Klein for Fiddler on the Roof at Regent's Park Open Air theatreMaimuna Memon for Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812 at Donmar Warehouse – WINNER!
Best actor in a supporting role in a musicalAndy Nyman for Hello, Dolly! at the London Palladium
Raphael Papo for Fiddler on the Roof at Regent's Park Open Air theatreLayton Williams for Titanique at Criterion theatre – WINNER!
Tom Xander for Mean Girls at Savoy theatre
Best new entertainment or comedy playBallet Shoes adapted by Kendall Feaver at National Theatre – Olivier
Inside No 9 Stage/Fright by Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith at Wyndham's theatre
Spirited Away adapted by John Caird and co-adapted by Maoko Imai at London ColiseumTitanique by Tye Blue, Marla Mindelle and Constantine Rousouli at Criterion theatre – WINNER!
Best director
Eline Arbo for The Years at Almeida theatre and Harold Pinter theatre – WINNER!
Jordan Fein for Fiddler on the Roof at Regent's Park Open Air theatre
Nicholas Hytner for Giant at Jerwood theatre Downstairs at Royal Court theatre
Robert Icke for Oedipus at Wyndham's theatre
Best actressHeather Agyepong for Shifters at Duke of York's theatreLesley Manville for Oedipus at Wyndham's theatre – WINNER!
Rosie Sheehy for Machinal at the Old Vic
Meera Syal for A Tupperware of Ashes at National Theatre – Dorfman
Indira Varma for Oedipus at the Old Vic
Best actorAdrien Brody for The Fear of 13 at Donmar Warehouse
Billy Crudup for Harry Clarke at Ambassadors theatre
Paapa Essiedu for Death of England: Delroy at @sohoplaceJohn Lithgow for Giant at Jerwood theatre Downstairs at Royal Court theatre – WINNER!
Mark Strong for Oedipus at Wyndham's theatre
Best revivalThe Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde at National Theatre – Lyttelton
Machinal by Sophie Treadwell at the Old VicOedipus by Robert Icke at Wyndham's theatre – WINNER!
Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett at Theatre Royal Haymarket
Best musical revival
Fiddler on the Roof, music by Jerry Bock, lyrics by Sheldon Harnick, book by Joseph Stein at Regent's Park Open Air theatre – WINNER!
Hello, Dolly!, music and lyrics by Jerry Herman, book by Michael Stewart at the London Palladium
Oliver!, book, music and lyrics by Lionel Bart, new material and revisions by Cameron Mackintosh at Gielgud theatre
Starlight Express, music by Andrew Lloyd Webber, lyrics by Richard Stilgoe at Troubadour Wembley Park theatre
Best actor in a musical
John Dagleish for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button at Ambassadors theatre – WINNER!
Adam Dannheisser for Fiddler on the Roof at Regent's Park Open Air theatre
Myles Frost for MJ the Musical at Prince Edward theatre
Simon Lipkin for Oliver! at Gielgud theatre
Jamie Muscato for Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812 at Donmar Warehouse
Best actress in a musicalChumisa Dornford-May for Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812 at Donmar Warehouse
Lauren Drew for Titanique at Criterion theatre
Clare Foster for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button at Ambassadors theatre
Lara Pulver for Fiddler on the Roof at Regent's Park Open Air theatreImelda Staunton for Hello, Dolly! at the London Palladium – WINNER!
Best new playThe Fear of 13 by Lindsey Ferrentino at Donmar WarehouseGiant by Mark Rosenblatt at Jerwood theatre Downstairs at Royal Court theatre – WINNER!
Kyoto by Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson at @sohoplace
Shifters by Benedict Lombe at Duke of York's theatre
The Years adapted by Eline Arbo, in an English version by Stephanie Bain at Almeida theatre and Harold Pinter theatre
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Daily Mail
3 hours ago
- Daily Mail
PATRICK MARMION reviews Fiddler On The Roof's first night at the Barbican Theatre: Topol made the film sing, but this Fiddler dances to its own tune
Fiddler On The Roof (Barbican Theatre, London) Rating: The big musical in London's Barbican Theatre this summer is a joyous, but finally sombre, revival of the sixties classic about life in an East European shtetl in the early 20th century. The show is surely still best known from the 1971 film starring Chaim Topol as the hard-working, God-fearing milkman Tevye with five feisty daughters to marry off. But the great achievement of this Olivier Award-winning production (first seen in Regent's Park last year) is to stand squarely on its own feet – thanks largely to the terrific Adam Dannheisser as Tevye (alongside Lara Pulver as his wife Golde). He is a proper put-upon mensch, who dutifully drags the weight of his Jewish heritage behind him like the cart normally hauled by his lame horse. With a twinkle in his eye, Dannheisser is a big softy who brings heartiness, pathos and mischief to the part. Accompanied by a gangly violinist (Raphael Papo) who mirrors his inner pain, Tevye – and the show – are buoyed by Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick's music and lyrics, most famously in the stomp of Tradition, but also in the comic plea for God to smite him with a just small fortune in If I Were A Rich Man. American director Jordan Fein's production includes a glorious dream sequence resurrecting Golde's long-dead grandma. And Julia Cheng's reeling choreography is a riot –whether it's toasting Tevye's eldest daughter's betrothal in the tavern (ominously interrupted by menacing Cossacks), or at the actual wedding, which has celebrants spinning like huge black spiders with bottles balanced on their heads. Surrounded by grassland torched in a violent pogrom authorised by the Tsar, the second half takes a darker turn. And we are kept mindful of global events today – as Perchik, a suitor from Kyiv, warns Tevye: 'You can't close your eyes to what's happening in the world.' Fiddler On The Roof runs until July 19.
Telegraph
5 hours ago
- Telegraph
Fiddler on the Roof: The glorious revival moves indoors, and loses the wow factor
Fresh from winning three Olivier awards, Jordan Fein's superb Regent's Park revival of Fiddler on the Roof has been transplanted to form the big summer musical offering at the Barbican. Jerry Bock, Sheldon Harnick and Joseph Stein's instant 1964 Broadway classic about a toiling shtetl milkman contending with five daughters and a world in transition at the turn of the 20th century always does a roaring trade, but this loving iteration merits packed houses. Even so, I was also left wishing I'd caught the production at Regent's Park Open Air theatre last August. The alfresco setting clearly augmented the portrait of a Jewish community not snugly self-contained but vulnerable to the elements as well as brutish Russians. The dominant image of Tom Scutt's design is of wheat fields; indeed the evening memorably opens not with a fiddler on a roof but a fiddler (the talented, spectral Raphael Papo) atop a rising cross-section of burgeoning wheat field that forms an ominous canopy. That exquisite number late in Act One – Sunrise, Sunset – in which the locals gather to celebrate the marriage of Tzeitel (the milkman Tevye's eldest daughter) to the diffident tailor Motel, last year magically coincided with nightfall itself. Presented here amid candlelit gloom, the song still carries a spine-tingling charge. The pair have broken with tradition in seeking a love match (the days are hence numbered for Beverley Klein's tireless matchmaker Yente). The wistful ritualistic mood around them affirms vast cycles of nature. So even if the earthiness for which this incarnation was celebrated is less in evidence now, that's no reason to kvetch about the experience overall. Compared with his co-directing work on the recent stripped-back Oklahoma!, Fein privileges emotional truth over experimentation, the imperishable score rendered with musical heft and folksy simplicity, the lighting beautiful without being self-advertising. Julia Cheng's choreography, particularly in the famous bottle-balancing dance sequence, replete with precise, angular, sweeping leg moves, is a joy. Adam Dannheisser's commanding performance as Tevye is of a piece with this confident restraint. No actor can eclipse the ebullient memory of Zero Mostel or Topol and this American actor gives us instead a figure of grounded ordinariness and even surprising level-headedness. He has comic value, but he doesn't aim it at the gallery; when he sings If I Were a Rich Man, the village looks on, half amused, half sharing the dream too. He's an everyday father repeatedly tested by demands for independence by his daughters. (Natasha Jules Bernard, Hannah Bristow and Georgia Bruce are contrastingly spirited as the main three, Tzeitel, Chava and Hodel). Of course, there is a grim frisson – and a topical one – to the vision of collective displacement in the second half, but what resonates most is Tevye's agonised attempt to reconcile his paternal care with his devotion to his people, and his stern God. At a time of cultural upheaval, of daily concerns about what we must fight for, and discard, that hits home.
Time Out
4 days ago
- Time Out
Oh, Mary! director Sam Pinkleton on comedy, truth and the right kind of wrong
"I'm obsessed with rollercoasters," says Sam Pinkleton, the director of the Broadway smash Oh, Mary!"Much more than theater, unfortunately." He's semi-joking about that last part, but it does give a sense of the sensibility he has brought to Cole Escola's zany pseudo-historical farce about Mary Todd Lincoln—who, in Escola's fevered comic vision, is a raging boozehound clinging to delusional hopes of stardom as a cabaret chanteuse. It has been Pinkleton's job to keep the play on track as, not unlike a rollercoaster, it races through Mary's wild highs and lows, evoking screams of laughter. The assignment is harder than the result makes it look: not only to keep the comedy rolling, nearly without stopping for breath, but also to sustain the right tonal balance of irreverence and celebration, and even to tease out latent strands of feeling. Pinkleton has worked on nine Broadway shows, but mostly as a movement director or choreographer; he earned his first Tony nomination for his excellent works Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812. Oh, Mary!, his Broadway debut as a director, has earned him a second nomination this year. We talked with him about about actresses, camp and what makes Oh, Mary! such a wild ride. In advance of the Tony Awards on June 8, Time Out has conducted in-depth interviews with select nominees. We'll be rolling out those interviews every day this week; the full collection to date is here. You've had projects on Broadway before, but they've been as a choreographer. This is your Broadway debut as a director. And it seems to have gone very well! It has, definitely. It has objectively gone well. Because it's a farce, the movement is very tightly orchestrated. Would it be fair to call it choreographed? It's definitely rigorous and calculated. We're going after a very specific thing with it. But it felt—not to be reductive about it—it just felt like directing a play. It felt like directing a play that had a lot of extreme physical assignments and requirements that we wanted to approach with honesty and stupidity. Thinking about it as meticulously choreographed came after the fact. At no point at the beginning of it, when Cole and I were talking about it, was I thinking, "Well, I'm a highly experienced choreographer and that is gonna really come in handy." It was just, Oh, Let's roll our sleeves up and throw our bodies around. And Cole is only capable of performing at 125%, so with Cole at the center of it, it could only be a Super Bowl physical event. I had the pleasure of seeing Betty Gilpin as Mary during her stint as a replacement, and she gave an immensely physical performance as well. I mean, that shouldn't be a surprise—because she was in GLOW for goodness' sake, which couldn't be more physical—but it was interesting to see her in the part because she was a very different Mary. Betty Gilpin is an Olympian in every way. She is the most exacting and fierce—I mean, she learned how to wrestle professionally for a TV show, and that's the energy she came in with. She and Cole—and Tituss, in a way—are very similar in that they're athletes. They approached the play like athletes. And it's not pleasant psychological work. It's like working in a butcher shop. When Cole is playing Mary, it has a protective coloration of camp in a way that's just inherent to Cole's sensibility and presence on stage. Whereas with Betty, it felt really raw and emotional. She was still very funny, but she was really invested. Because Mary seems bipolar or something, if you take her literally. I keep saying I've had to direct the play four times now—which has been great. I hope to direct the play 30 times—but Betty, because she was the first, taught me how good the play is, if that makes sense. Because all of a sudden there's a great actress who shows up to work with a script and is taking it at face value, and it's like, Oh yeah, right! This is about a woman in crisis who has this incredible need, who will do anything she can to get what she wants. And that sounds like every play I've ever heard of before; it's the bones of good drama. And I totally agree with you: She played it straight. She just did it. And that made me really excited about seeing actresses do it. Because you know Cole; Cole loves an actress. And I don't even mean on Broadway—I mean seeing that lady in Cleveland who was amazing in Ibsen do this. Yes! I wanna see the regional theater ladies get their fingers on this because it's such a juicy part. I mean, Cole wrote it for themself and is glorious and perfect as Mary. But it turns out it can work well even without them. Completely. I think we've talked about this so much that people are tired of hearing about it, but it's true: In rehearsal, the thing we did was take it dead seriously. We tried to make it as honest and as deep as possible. The means of doing that were often completely idiotic, but we weren't trying to make gags. We were trying to really approach this woman with love. And I do think Betty really anchored it in gravity. But yeah, I wanna see all those regional theater ladies do it. I also wanna hear them say cunt. [Laughs.] They don't get to say cunt in Ibsen. Not as often as one would like! Someone should do it in Hedda Gabler, maybe. But Oh, Mary! is very much a comedy, which is one of the things that makes the Tony race for Best Place so interesting this year. I liked all five of the nominees a lot, but they are very, very different. It's always a crapshoot, but comedies are historically at a big disadvantage. Yasmina Reza won for Art and God of Carnage, but it's hard to think of others. Neil Simon never won until his late-career dramedies. Tom Stoppard won for Travesties and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, which are sort of comedies I guess, but they have such a literary bent. Yes. We're like that, Adam! What's the difference? [ Laughs. ] I just mean that if Oh, Mary! were to win Best Play, that would really be kind of unprecedented for the kind of hard comedy it is. And yet it feels like the show is really in the running. As you say, it's a crapshoot. It's been an extraordinary season, and I love all of the plays that were nominated, which is strange and rare. Plays that are not regurgitated! So I don't know what's gonna happen, and I certainly can't try to predict that. But I have watched the play get taken really seriously by audiences over the life cycles of it. When we decided to come to Broadway, we were like, Okay, we're gonna do it for a very short amount of time just so that more dumb gay people can see it. But over the last year, I have watched tourist families enjoy our show and I've watched people who read The New Yorker and go to every play enjoy our show. And I'm sure there are people who don't enjoy our show, but it has been a really pleasant surprise—and frankly, quite moving—to see the show get embraced by an audience that is quite a bit broader than what Cole and I were thinking about when we started making it. Because the play is oddly sincere and uncynical, and it's made with a lot of love. It's made by people who—I am so tired of hearing myself say this, but it's unfortunately true—it's made by theater nerds. It's not like, "Fuck you! We're doing this play!" I think part of why it works is that Cole loves the form so much, and our designers love the form so much. The production strikes such a tricky balance, because to some extent it's gonna be tongue-in-cheek; it's designed and performed in a kind of low-tech style that knowingly verges on amateurism, which is part of its camp sensibility. You don't want it to be perfect, because then it just is the thing itself; it has to be something that aspires to be the thing but in some way isn't quite the thing. Camp is so complicated and we don't need to go down a long rabbit hole about it—I mean, I literally spent an hour at Julius' last week trying to explain to a straight Marine. Wow, that is a community service. Yeah. Well, first I said that something was kitsch, and he didn't know what that meant, so I said, Well, it's a little like camp for straight people, but not quite, and then he didn't understand that at all. So I had to step back and find some kind of beginning… But also you explaining all this to a stray Marine at Julius is camp. So the snake is just biting its tail. [ Laughs.] Right? But it's actual camp—it's not campy, if you know what I mean. And there really isn't an exact defining line for any of these things. The production deliberately seems a certain way. You have set designers who very much know what they're doing and would be capable of designing a more realistic set if they chose to. Same with the costumes: They should look like they're out of a trunk, and the beards shouldn't look like perfect fake beards. So where does that line approximately sit for you? I have to be honest, It's a real tightrope walk. It came from a ton of trial and error, and it has been refined a lot along the way. When I look back at the pictures from tech when we did it downtown, I'm like, This is embarrassing! This wasn't a good show! 'Cause it was the wrong kind of wrong, you know? And we've been trying to find the right kind of wrong. And one thing that's really important to me is that it doesn't feel like we're mocking something. It doesn't feel like we're rolling our eyes or taking the wind out of something. We're actually embracing it and loving it. In our first conversations, Cole and I talked about doing theater in high school, when you're like, This set is completely amazing! And you look back at it in pictures and actually that set was really shitty. But it was made with love. And we talked about going to community theater where people are putting effort into something. That was the biggest thing. When community-theater designers and directors and actors make a show, they're not making fun of it. They love it. They're doing the absolute best they can with the tools they have. So yes, the bookshelf is flat and painted, but it's cared for. I think that has really been the line. And we had the privilege of refining it Off Broadway; a lot of details really changed on Broadway, actually, even though I hope it still seems like the same show. But as a group of collaborators, we got very good at feeling like, Oh, that is the show, but that's a step too far or that feels cynical or that feels like we're just trying to make people laugh or that's too good, as you say. But I think that's every show: You find that weird sweet spot and it can be kind of chemical. There's a bit of a Mickey and Judy quality. The joy of it is that they're putting up a show in the barn, and if you go to that barn show and sniff that it's not up to Ziegfeld Follies standards, you're getting it wrong. The limitations of the Lortel informed a lot for us, and also the kind of big-eyed wonder—when you're making a show in a barn or your high school or whatever—of, 'We're gonna have a set change.' But you can really only have one, so that means you just spin the set around. And that worked at the Lortel. But when we moved to Broadway, one of the first things I said to the designers was, We can't apologize for being on Broadway. The Lyceum is so beautiful, and it looks like it was designed for the play. The theater itself is funny; it looks like The Muppet Show. So I want to embrace that we're on Broadway. I want to embrace that there are people on that top balcony as opposed to, 'Yeah, we're doing this crazy downtown thing uptown, 'cause it's a prank!' It's not a prank. It looks beautiful in that theater. And the big surprise at the end of the show—you know what it is—was completely redesigned on Broadway, because we wanted to embrace the scale of the room. And if we had done what we did downtown, it would've felt like, 'Ha ha, isn't this shitty? Ha ha ha.' And that's not the story. The story is that her dreams come true. Right? And if Cole were not themself like Mary in some sense—if Cole had not actually spent 15 years performing in cabarets around the city—then it would feel quite different, I think. It would feel false. It would feel like a lie. Cole has always been so magical. I was trying to think back to the last time I saw a lead performer in a Broadway comedy who commanded the stage and the audience so completely. I'm probably forgetting someone, but the one that came to mind for me was Linda Lavin in The Tale of the Allergist's Wife. I was just about to—! As you were saying this, I was like, It's really Linda Lavin. Yes, and then I remembered that you worked with Linda! The other major production I've seen that you've directed was You Will Get Sick with her in 2022. And you were also involved with The Lyons when it was on Broadway in 2011. What was your experience of working with her? I actually told this story very recently. I met her on The Lyons, which was at its heart a comedy but went to dark places. She's the hardest worker in show business. But she was so exacting about timing and physical comedy: If I turn my head here, they'll laugh, but if I do this, they won't. Like a mad scientist, obsessive with details. And it was the coolest thing in the world to watch—to sit between her and [the playwright] Nicky Silver, who is also super exacting about comedy, and old-school: bah-pah-da-pa-dah and boom, everybody laughs. That was grad school for me, especially because we got to do that play twice. So I spent a year watching Linda make comedy, and when I asked her to do You Will Get Sick, which was ultimately her last play, she said yes very quickly, which was cool, because she wanted to do weird, unexpected things with new writers. She was 85 and had three-page monologues and showed up on the first day off book. At the beginning of every rehearsal, I make everybody do an idiotic physical warmup to pop music—no opting out. And Linda Lavin at 85 was very happily jiggling around to Rihanna. I talked to Cole about her all the time because they sadly didn't know each other. After Cole, she's the funniest person I've ever met. She would do the show and then go to the bar and continue to make you laugh. She was a very major loss for me. She became a very good friend in the last few years of her life. Did you know her at all? No. I got to meet her a couple of times, but no. Well, all the rumors are true. We just finished the Linda Lavin memorial tour: four different events, each gayer than the last. And all anyone could say was just what a hard worker she was and how rigorous and not-accidental it was. I think that's a thing she really shares with Cole. It's easy to come see Oh, Mary! and say it's hilarious. Adam—it's so much work. And there is no detail too small. It's a very old-school thing. And there definitely is an old-school quality to Cole's sensibility. That's evident in every aspect of their personality. And that's part of the secret in this show, I think. Oh, Mary! seems like a weird new thing on Broadway, but it works because it has deep Broadway roots—like Hamilton does, or Company. These shows that change the game can't be completely off the map, because then they wouldn't work. Totally. This is made by theater people. Cole and I are theater people. When we were designing it and teching it, the things we were talking about were, like, Jerry Herman musicals and boulevard comedies and—plays! Plays. I probably shouldn't say this, but for something that has been lauded for being so unconventional, it's really conventional. It sort of sneaks in. By the end you realize, Oh wait! This is a play! It's a play with a couch! And I appreciate you asking about it being serious as a play, because that is a thing I really care about. I care about it because I think it's such an exacting piece of writing. It's certainly serious about being entertaining. But there isn't an obvious message. I mean, a lot of plays have a feeling of importance because they're about something important. Everything is an issue play now, or else people don't think it's important enough to be on Broadway. But I don't know what the issue is in Oh, Mary! I don't think there's an issue that's like, 'We're upset about healthcare policy so we gotta fight it out in the streets of Detroit.' But we talked a lot in rehearsal about how the story was gonna end for her. And there were a lot of different versions of it. And it became very important to me and Cole that she won. That she got it. And I have grown to be very moved—watching, like, my dad from Southern Virginia watch Oh, Mary! —by the very simple thing of, like: It's about a woman who wants something and everybody thinks she's crazy. Everybody thinks she's crazy and she's fucking not. And that is meaningful to me. Well, she's not un -crazy. She's not—well— I think I would say that it's not, for me, that she's not crazy. It's that crazy people deserve things too. Totally—yes. Yes. And I do feel very moved by that. There's a little speech in a scene in the middle of the play with Mary's teacher, where she talks about the highs being too high and the lows being too low, and how being with Abe is this steadying thing because she can't have a great day. I do think that if you peel back all the layers of total fucking buffoonery, she's a character that any weirdo or anyone who has felt like a weirdo can relate to. I think Cole has gone on the record about the oddly autobiographical nature of the character and of the show. So the bones of it are rooted in truth. That's cliché, but it's absolutely true. If they weren't, we would have a 10-minute sketch. It would be a delightful 10-minute sketch, but it would be a sketch and you would get tired of it pretty quickly. Right. And this somehow keeps a comic momentum for 85 minutes, which is almost impossible these days. The pacing is relentless. But I imagine there's no good way to answer the question of how you keep that up, because it's just moment by moment, I guess. Moment by moment. And not treating the audience like idiots. Cole and I are obsessed—capital-o Obsessed —with the game of staying ahead of the audience. Part of the development of the play—because we carve away at it through previews downtown and even through previews on Broadway—is that the minute it feels like the audience is ahead of it, move on, move on, move on. And that is a science. It can be hard because there might be things that you love doing, but the fun of the ride is staying ahead of the audience. I reread every Agatha Christie book during the pandemic, and I sometimes feel like many plays are secretly mysteries. Who did what, and when? Where is it going, and why? And like in a mystery, the show plants the clues as it goes along so you can look back at the end and it all makes sense. Totally. It's the theater. It shouldn't be a passive experience. Give people something to do. It's fun when it's a ride. But you don't want the clues to stick out too obviously, or it's boring. Yes. But the ride—I actually just ran into somebody on the street who was like, 'I've seen the play eight times.' And I was like, Well, first of all, you have a sickness. But I hear that a play has a ton of secrets, and part of the fun is discovering those secrets. But it's like riding a rollercoaster. And if you love a rollercoaster, you love to ride it over and over again, even if you know where it's gonna go.
