“Oh, Mary!” star Cole Escola manifested their Tony win the old-fashioned way

It seems to happen less and less, but every so often, the stars still align. The puzzle pieces of the universe fit perfectly together. A witch’s dusty spellbook — trapped in the highest tower of the oldest castle — flies open all on its own, turning its pages to an old incantation said to make everything okay again, if only for a few moments. With that, the die is cast, destiny is in motion and Mary Todd Lincoln gets her long-awaited Tony for her cabaret prowess.

Or, rather, her second Tony, as “Oh, Mary!” scribe and star Cole Escola so studiously noted as they accepted their Tony for best actor in a play at Sunday’s Tony Awards ceremony. “Julie Harris has a Tony for playing Mary Todd Lincoln,” Escola said as they started their speech, paying reverence to the stage legend’s 1972 play, “The Last of Mrs. Lincoln.” But in Escola’s relatively short time in their first starring role on Broadway, they’ve become something of a legend themself. “Oh, Mary!” is Escola’s debut on Broadway proper, after a throng of smaller (though no less hysterical) off-Broadway and independent cabaret and solo shows, and the play was a hit within minutes of its first preview’s curtain-raise in January 2024. The show imagines Mary Todd Lincoln as a hard-drinking, boisterous, wannabe cabaret star, beleaguered by her marriage to what Escola imagines is an obviously gay president. It’s not so much laugh-a-minute as it is laugh-a-second. When I saw the play during its initial off-Broadway run at Manhattan’s Lucille Lortel Theater in March 2024, the sold-out house practically shook with thunderous applause during the cast’s final bows. 

Writer/Star Cole Escola poses during a photo call for the Broadway comedy “Oh, Mary!” at The Players NYC on June 25, 2024, in New York City. (Bruce Glikas/Getty Images)

“Oh, Mary!” is the kind of instant sensation that’s all too rare these days, one so undeniable it immediately breaks through the crowd of theater savants to a wider audience of curious patrons. To longtime fans of Escola’s like myself, the show’s smash success is more of a reason to shed a tear than it is any surprise. Escola’s work has always been blissfully weird yet totally charming, hyper-confident in its discerning peculiarity. And “Oh, Mary!” is their long-gestating, brilliant brainchild, shepherded from an email Escola sent to themselves in 2009 all the way to the Tonys stage. It’s a theater of the politically absurd when every day of our waking lives is a theater of the politically absurd. But the convergence of Escola’s talents and our national nightmares wasn’t some stroke of luck. Escola didn’t catch up to the culture; the culture caught up to them. Their win and ongoing success are fate manifested, a testament to the power of hard work and uncompromising vision. Sometimes, the right things still happen.

If you haven’t yet had the chance to see “Oh, Mary!” live, Escola succinctly describes the play in that 2009 email they sent themselves, as retold in their recent interview with “CBS Sunday Morning.” “What if Abraham Lincoln’s assassination wasn’t such a bad thing for Mary Todd?” the email read. But as Escola tells it, this kernel of a larger concept was too precious to let go of back then. “I loved this idea so much, I didn’t want it to get on paper and for it to disappoint me,” Escola said in the interview. “To disappoint me, not just the audience, but me. There are certain ideas that you’re just like, ‘Oh, I don’t want to plant this seed, because what if it’s an ugly flower?’”

The fear is understandable, given the number of things that could go wrong in the process of turning one simple idea into a fully mounted Broadway production. But Escola has never been afraid of a little ugliness or a little grit. Their willingness to embrace the flawed, strange parts of life has long been part of their unique allure. Take something like “Pee Pee Manor,” their 17-minute “unaired television pilot that was too awful to air,” about a woman who moves into a cursed piece of broken-down real estate, posted directly to Escola’s YouTube channel. Like all of Escola’s work, it’s outrageous and unforgettable, showcasing a flair for character work unlike anyone else. Escola is preternaturally gifted when it comes to picking up on people’s eccentricities and molding them into a beautifully Frankensteined creation. When Donna, the short’s bouffant-styled main character, says her first line — “So eventually I just took the thing down, I said, ‘I’m sick of feedin’ humming birds, they oughta feed me for once!” — the viewer knows exactly who this woman is and what she’s all about. She’s our mother, our grandmother, our wacky aunt and the woman striking up a conversation with us in the checkout line at Kohl’s.

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The same goes for Escola’s version of Mary Todd, who arrived fully formed by the time her loafers hit the stage of the Lucille Lortel for the first time. Mary is a whiskey-smuggling alcoholic and man-eating cabaret amateur, so dead bored in her marriage that she wishes her husband were dead himself. She yells, stomps her feet and raises her hoop skirt and petticoat to scandalous heights. Meanwhile, Abraham (Conrad Ricamora) has a pesky Civil War to deal with, so he leaves Mary in the care of her chaperone (Bianca Leigh) and teacher (James Scully). She loathes the former and lusts after the latter, and her heightened emotions and cabaret dreams swell to a magnificent, hysterical crescendo unlike Broadway has ever seen. In a way, “Oh, Mary!” is the anti-“Hamilton.” It’s not concerned with America’s founding principles but rather with the country’s spectacle. This is the way things have always been, which is to say: totally bananas. It’s no wonder the play hit when America’s political atmosphere feels its most ridiculous.

Cole Escola accepts the Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role in a Play award for “Oh, Mary!” from Sarah Paulson and Jean Smart during The 78th Annual Tony Awards on June 08, 2025. (Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for Tony Awards Productions)

It is a uniquely strange feeling to watch Escola’s success reach new, deserved heights as America falls off the deep end. I’ve been devouring Escola’s work for well over a decade, since I discovered the videos they were making online in the late 2000s, alongside their best friend, Jeffery Self. As scrappy, floppy-haired creators in YouTube’s nascent days, Self and Escola made short, terribly smart and timely videos under the moniker VGL Gay Boys. (“Very Good Looking,” as the acronym stands.) The videos’ modest success among the gay community landed the two a short-lived sketch show on Logo, “Jeffery and Cole Casserole.” Think of it like a proof-of-concept for something like “Broad City,” another show about two New York millennials that similarly went from web series to television — only “Jeffrey and Cole Casserole” had a much shorter lifespan. 

Things were far more hopeful back then. How could they not be? Barack Obama was pulling ahead in polling, and the cultural tides were starting to turn in favor of the late aughts’ flavor of liberalism. Don’t Ask Don’t Tell was on its way out and gay marriage was on the horizon! A new artist by the name of Lady Gaga was bursting onto the scene! “The Dark Knight” was making superhero movies cool again! It was a formative time for the newly out-of-the-closet, 14-year-old me, who recognized my sick and stupid sense of humor in Escola and Self’s videos. 

Perhaps my favorite of them all was a video called “VGL Gay Boys with Bernadette Peters,” the first selection of what would become an ongoing, go-to impression for Escola, who donned a curly, red wig and squeaky voice to parody the Broadway legend. The premise of the video is simple: Self and Escola were going to record a video review of the 2008 comedy “Get Smart,” but Escola insists on playing Bernadette Peters for the day. Unwilling to break character, Escola’s version of Peters has not seen the movie, so instead, the pair reviews “Home Alone 2,” which Peters can’t recall a single frame of either. The video is barely two minutes long, yet incessantly quotable, which any friend of mine for the last 17 years has learned at one point or another when they’ve been subjected to watching it.

Sam Pinkleton and Cole Escola at The 78th Annual Tony Awards held at Radio City Music Hall on June 08, 2025, in New York, New York. (John Nacion/Variety via Getty Images)

Seeing Escola on the Tonys red carpet, I couldn’t help but recall that video for the billionth time. Escola did, after all, show up to the ceremony in Bernadette Peters drag, now polished and elevated thanks to all of that Broadway box office record-shattering. Escola sported a curly updo and a gown that was an homage to the costume Peters wore accepting her Tony in 1999 for “Annie Get Your Gun.” Seeing Escola on that stage accepting their first Tony while honoring one of their formative inspirations, it struck me that this is the kind of heartening, full-circle moment we rarely witness. Is that not the American dream, being born into one life or socioeconomic status and forging your way into whatever your picture of success looks like? Escola went from recording videos on a webcam to accepting the Tony for best actor; from imitating a legend to becoming one in their own right. 

But for Escola, it seemed almost predestined, spoken into the universe so frequently it had to become true. Calling it a picture of the American dream would be reductive, diminishing all of the work that Escola has done to apply it to an outmoded path toward prosperity. “Oh, Mary!” might be a distinctly American show, but this is Escola’s dream, first and foremost, and it was going to come to fruition no matter what.

In that VGL Gay Boys “Get Smart” review video, Escola’s version of Bernadette Peters tells Self, “I haven’t seen any movie since 1999.” When Self asks why that year specifically, Escola replies, “That’s the year I won my Tony.” And at the mic, Tony in hand and dressed as Peters was in 1999, Escola took a moment to bring it back to where it all began. “To the most important people in my life, my friends, who are here tonight,” Escola said, before shouting out Self at the top of the list. And there in the audience was Self, shedding a tear for his friend, watching their dream come true.