22-05-2025
‘Oh, Mary!' Tony nominee Conrad Ricamora on getting laughs as Abraham Lincoln: ‘I've got to take the stakes deadly seriously'
"The jokes are always so strong, but the surprising thing is that people have been so moved by the show as well," says Conrad Ricamora of the hit new play Oh, Mary! The actor stars opposite playwright Cole Escola, and earned his first career Tony nomination for matching the zany, camp energy of the writer.
Ricamora has been with the production since its original off-Broadway run, and believes that much of its success is because of the seriousness behind the jokes. In a recent Gold Derby interview, he discusses the commitment to the seriousness behind the hysterics, his love of classic plays, and his thoughts about a potential sequel to the fan-favorite movie Fire Island.
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Gold Derby: Could you have imagined the unprecedented mainstream success of when you were performing the show downtown at the Lucille Lortel Theatre?
Conrad Ricamora: It all feels like this impossible thing. The show that we're doing every night is a show that comes from Cole's mind, who I've been a fan of for over a decade when they were self-funding their own YouTube videos and their one person shows at Joe's Pub. So when I got approached about doing Oh, Mary!, I was like, yeah, this will probably be a niche downtown hit. And now we're outselling some big musicals on Broadway, which is insane. It's hard to understand and wrap my head around. It was always a hit in my heart. But I like a lot of things that aren't big mainstream hits.
You play Abraham Lincoln. I think everyone has this distinct image of him in their heads. I know isn't exactly documentary-style theater, but how do you relate your character with this image that we have of Abe Lincoln?
It's funny that you say that because there is a lot of documentation that Abe slept in bed with different men. Even after he got married to Mary Todd Lincoln, he would sleep in bed with some secret service. And so there are all of these rumors. So it turns out that without doing research, Cole was onto something that people have thought about. During the second or third week of rehearsal, I remember I'd never seen Gone With the Wind and I watched it. And something clicked. It was the way Cole writes characters and comments on gender roles, the way that the women in Cole's play speak. And the men, the way that they're supposed to behave and what they're suppressing. That is something I'll still probably be unpacking for a while. But watching Gone With the Wind and seeing the sincerity of the gender roles. Seeing Vivian Leigh [as Scarlett O'Hara], she flipped into hysteria so quickly, but it was sincere. And seeing Rhett Butler having to be strong, commanding, not vulnerable in any way. And then seeing how that relates to what Cole has written and how those things fall apart with an extremely ambitious woman in Mary Todd Lincoln and an extremely vulnerable man. To me, Abe is so vulnerable, but overcompensates in so many ways until he just crumbles.
There is certainly plenty of hysteria in play, especially from Cole. What is it like being on the receiving end of that energy?
It's the most frustrating thing I've ever had to do on stage. What I am tasked to do is gain control over the wildest, most insane animal on stage. And my job is to convince myself every night that tonight I'm going to get control over her. I'm going to make her behave for the sake of our country, for the sake of myself, for the sake of everything. I'm going to make her fall in line and conform. And it's the most exhausting thing. It's rewarding that the audience gets to laugh at it, and laugh at the twists and turns. But for me, it is so exhausting because Cole is so committed and Cole has written such a demented character, and Abe responds in kind. He has to respond with the same type of energy, otherwise, Mary would just walk all over him. So I love giving that laughter to an audience every night, but I can't sit in the laughter and enjoy it. I've got to take the stakes deadly seriously.
Your character is not as demented as Cole's, but you are certainly expelling plenty of energy. How do you vocally sustain those scenes yelling at Cole?
I mean, I give a lot of credit to all of the voice teachers that I've had over the years. In my 20s and 30s, in addition, going to grad school, in addition to doing plays, I was constantly taking classes with different teachers, and you learn how to place things and not let your technique get in the way of your intuition. So it's managing those two things in order to do eight shows a week … it's the culmination of doing this for over 20 years professionally. It just becomes second nature.
With the move to Broadway, the types of people sitting in the audience has expanded so much since the smaller downtown run. What is it like performing to these new kinds of audience members?
It really does feel like we're opening up people's minds to downtown queer theater. At the Drama League Awards, there was somebody that came up to me and said, I've seen your show three times now, but it's because my daughter, who lives down in the village, saw it at the Lortel. And she is into the queer community and queer theater. And she made me go see it, and I've now seen it three times. It was an older man who's probably in his 50s or 60s. So hearing stuff like that is wild.
Most of the stage roles I've seen you in have been musicals, like , , and . You earned Grammy nominations for the latter two shows. Are there dream musical roles that you want to cross off your bucket list?
It's funny that you say that because before I moved to New York, I did a lot more plays than musicals. But as an Asian-American male actor, you move to New York and all of a sudden, you just get put in Asian musicals like The King and I and Miss Saigon. I have found that I've been in this narrow range. The first time I burst out of that was doing Seymour in Little Shop of Horrors, and now playing Abraham Lincoln. A lot of my training and my passion lies in Shakespeare. I've done Romeo and Juliet four times outside of New York City. I've played Tartuffe at regional theaters. I've played Tom in Glass Menagerie in Philadelphia. So my passion lies in plays, and it's just really telling in some ways, New York City has to catch up to the rest of the country. I really want to do Oscar Wilde at some point. So I'm hoping that this kind of recognition will open up more of those types of conversations in New York City, because it's happening in other places.
Speaking of your other roles, director Andrew Ahn recently mentioned that there's ideas floating around in the ether for a sequel. What do you think your character would be up to in a second film?
Oh gosh. I feel like the longer we wait, the more my character is just going to be in an advisory role to a younger couple that they'll feature in the sequel! So yeah, Joel [Kim Booster], let's get cracking on this because the longer we wait, I'm just going to be the wiser, older gay man sitting at the pool that's like, 'You kids keep it down.' The first film took place in a party atmosphere on Fire Island and dealt with really deep friendship. I would like to see these couples that we left off with, dealing with what it looks like five or ten years into a committed relationship. What are the challenges at that point? After being newly married myself, I am ready to explore those types of themes in the art that I'm doing.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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