Tony Winner Sam Pinkleton Never Thought Oh, Mary! Would Be a Broadway Hit

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(Bloomberg) -- The riotously funny Oh, Mary!—a show that imagines Mary Todd Lincoln as an alcoholic and aspiring cabaret singer—won big at the Tony Awards on June 8, nabbing a best actor trophy for nonbinary comedian Cole Escola as Mary and a best director award for Sam Pinkleton. A veteran choreographer, Pinkleton was previously nominated for choreography in 2016 for Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812, but Oh, Mary! is his first Broadway directing credit.
The scrappy show started with a sold-out off-Broadway run at the Lucille Lortel Theatre in the West Village before transferring to the Lyceum Theatre last summer and has since broken box-office records. The wildly inventive, madcap show has been a critical and commercial smash, with talent including Tituss Burgess and Betty Gilpin donning the curly wig and black dress to play Lincoln. Star Escola is back in another limited run on Broadway, which has been extended through September. Despite Oh, Mary! 's massive success, Pinkleton says he and Escola had no inkling the production could become as big as it has.
'We just made the thing we wanted to make, we didn't try to make a hit,' Pinkleton says. 'If we would have tried to make a hit, we would have failed, I know that for sure. That's not how art works.' Bloomberg Pursuits caught up with the director in late April and talked about working with the different actors who played Mary, crafting a hit without a Hollywood A-lister on board and what audiences want to see onstage now.
What's it been like directing the show with different actors now? It's been Cole and then Betty and Tituss and now Cole again.
It's been absolutely insane. The show was built to run for eight weeks downtown, which felt like the biggest gift ever. Like, we got to do this crazy gay extreme thing off-Broadway and for Cole. That was all we were trying to do. That felt like enough, and we extended forever. But we never thought we were going to go to Broadway, and we certainly never thought it would run for long enough on Broadway to have to replace people. I always think that for Oh, Mary!, the dream coming true happened over a year ago.
This has all just been crazy phases of bonus stuff. In one breath, my answer is that it's all been amazing. And in another, it's required a lot of very exacting work to be like, 'Wait, what is this play? What do people love about it? What is a way to keep it what it is but also continue to be surprising?' So every Mary has required rethinking the part a little bit, but Cole wrote such a confident text, and it's become really fun to imagine all sorts of people in it. But I would be lying if I said we started thinking that that would ever be the case.
So you didn't go into it thinking it would be on Broadway?
Absolutely not. I mean, nobody said the word 'Broadway' until we were in our, like, second extension off-Broadway. If you told me when we were planning this off-Broadway that we might move to Broadway, I would be like, 'You are insane.' And frankly, I think having been in this position on other shows, I think if that had been in the room, the show wouldn't have been as good. I really believe that part of the success of it is that we genuinely were not trying to make some big commercial hit.
What do you think about the show that's made it resonate with so many people?
I think people really love to be surprised. And theater's really good at that. Cole and I agree on this—surprise is the engine of theater. And I think Oh, Mary! is a play that really loves being theater and delivers that sensation that you can only get in a room with actual people laughing at the same time, screaming at the same time. I'm sure we could find plenty of people who hated it, God bless 'em. But I think, to me, there's something really special about going on a ride with a group of people.
And I love standing in the back of the Lyceum and watching 900 people watch the show, many of them at this point, like, families on vacation, which is insane. It feels like a relief. And I'm sure there's plenty of theater people who would hate me for saying this, but there's enough to be serious and sad about. I'm not that interested in making the theater—which is for people choosing to go have a night out—to also be a drag. The world is really good at being a drag. I would like for theater to exist in opposition to that.
The world—or at least the news—can definitely be a drag right now.We didn't mean to hit that. And the show is aggressively apolitical. But to put it simply, I just think people like to have a nice time.
I spoke with Natasha Hodgson from Operation Mincemeat back in February and asked her a similar question about why her show has resonated with people. She told me that people just want to laugh and have fun.
First of all, I'm obsessed with Natasha Hodgson, but that show Operation Mincemeat—we adore each other, and we talk all the time. And even though the shows are so different, I do feel like the missions are aligned, which is to give people a f---ing fun night at the theater.
We see all these articles about Broadway shows breaking ticket-price records or making record amounts, and they're largely shows with big stars like George Clooney or Denzel Washington. You and Cole were able to make a hit without an A-list name attached to it.
We cast Oh, Mary! with the people we wanted to cast it with, and we were very lucky that we had producers who really trusted Cole and I to make the show. At no point did anyone look at us and say you need to cast, you know, the fourth member of Destiny's Child in order to do the show. That sounds like a dig on Michelle Williams, who is the world's absolute greatest, and she's so good in Death Becomes Her. It's not a dig! But we cast who we thought would be great, and it was important to everyone that when we moved to Broadway, that everybody went with us, including the entire design team, many of whom were making their Broadway debut.
I'm not going to knock, like, big starry things as long as they're good. I love working with stars. I'm working with stars right now, but I think the first mission should be 'let's make something good.' And if that happens to have stars in it, awesome. Oh, Mary! didn't. It could have. It didn't. And I'm so delighted that people seem to be coming because they want to see the play.
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