Thoughts on Nouveau - Minstrelsy

May Sixth, 2025: 

Thoughts on the merits 'Nouveau-Minstrelsy'

Photo by Dance10LooksTHREE via Reddit

Oh, Mary!

Person: Titus Burgess
Media: Oh Mary

Tituss Burgess as Mary & Phillip James Brannon as Mary’s Husband  in Oh, Mary! (Photo: Emilio Madrid)

    Oh, Mary!, a 2024 play written by Cole Escola, is an over-the-top farce about, and centered around, Escola’s fictionalized, self-insert(1), manic, fever dream, and utterly absurd pastiche of Mary Todd Lincoln.  Escola portrays themself, through Mary, as an alcoholic and ne’er-do-well; a rakish, yet rose tinted reminiscence of Escola’s past, wrapped in the guise of a loveless marriage in which Mary’s only ‘role’ is to serve as the beard for “Mary’s Husband” in order to protect his political career(2); a role Mary’s Husband forces her to play night after night.  In doing so, Mary’s Husband has shut Mary away from the world, depriving her of her one true love, cabaret, and this has driven Mary’s alcoholism and self-destructive behavior into overdrive; hilarious overdrive.

    For those who haven’t yet seen the show, this will be a relatively spoiler-free piece.  Yes, this is a “telling” of the relationship between Mary Todd Lincoln and Aberham Lincoln with a literal Chekov’s Wilkes’s gun that appears in the first five minutes, so it’s not like you don’t already know how it ends: the Titanic sinks.  And, yet, the plot does, in its own special little way, matter, and serves to shape the humor of the show.  So, perhaps, if you could imagine this next paragraph read with a comically over done mid-Atlantic dialect, that would be great:

 Will ‘Mary’s Husband’ be able to keep Mary, and himself, out of “trouble” long enough to win the war with The South?  What new torments will Mary invent for her Chaperone? What is the true plan of that handsome actor who’s weaseled his way into the White House as well as into Mary and her husband’s lives? Will Mary’s Husband’s assistant ever get that “big” promotion he’s been working “so” hard for? What will our “First Couple” think of Our American Cousin, when they go to see it at Ford's Theatre?  Can any performance be truly more magnificent than Cabaret? 

All this and more in the sensational new show on Broadway, Oh, Mary!

    If that doesn’t fully communicate the vibe of the play, the New York Times adeptly describes Escola’s Humor as “tailored like a Bernadette Peters concert gown to New York gays who were brought up on a diet of alt-cabaret and ‘Strangers With Candy.’” (3)

    Escola brought the role of Mary to life for the entirety of the show’s Off-Broadway run and continued as Mary during its Broadway debut. At the end of January 2025, during the show’s Broadway run, the show’s actors turned over their roles.  Escola ceding the titular role of Mary to Betty Gilpin, while Phillip James Brannon replaced Conrad Ricamora as ‘Mary’s Husband.’ (4)

Cole Escola, Betty Gilpin, and Tituss Burgess as Mary Todd Lincoln in Oh, Mary! (Photo Credit: PlayBill)

    I don’t have an opinion on cross-identity casting; given that these characters are only loosely based on historical figures, I’m not sure they can be assigned fixed identity markers.  Escola’s script does not ask for, nor does it make explicit, any particular racial or gender identity that Escola believes would be best suited to play the roles of any of their characters.  However, I think it is important to note that this is a show that takes place during the American Civil War and imagines President Aberham Lincoln as some version of “not-straight” and allosexual.  Because Mary is written as a self-insert as for Escola, who is non-binary, the gender identity and race of the characters, especially their relationship to Black identity, impacts the performers interpretations of the play’s characters and the audience’s experience of the humor.

There's a chart that will go here if I can ever figure out how to upload it without fucking up my entire article's formatting.

    Ricamora is a gay Filipino American, who is half-white.  He, like me, is light skinned and, at a glance, could pass for white.  Gilpin is a cisgender white woman.  And Brannon is a Black Gay man(5). I never got to see the show with a Black Aberham and white Mary Todd Lincoln, but I imagine the mixed race casting made for quite an interesting experience.  However, it is not nearly as interesting as when Betty Gilpin was replaced by Titus Burgess(6), slated to play a limited engagement, in the role of Mary.

    With Burgess taking over the role of Mary, Oh, Mary! transforms from an “un-researched”(7) Queer comedy about drag, gender, and American history, into a story about a speculative reimagining of a Black family in the White House during the Civil War.  This change in casting, and the opportunity Burgess and Brannon take with it, substantially shifts the tone of the play, laying bare for the audience the influence and legacy of 19th century Black humor and minstrelsy has been on contemporary American comedy.  

    Interviewed before the opening of the show, Burgess responded to Paul Wontorek’s statement 

“What I love about Oh Mary! especially is that, for me, it's just such a beautiful piece of queer art.” 

by stating:

I've not even thought about the fact that it's a piece of queer art. I've not even thought about the fact that I'm a man playing a woman. What I've thought about is that I'm Black, and that Abe is Black… And so that is what is on my mind, and that is what is downstage center.(8)

     While the script leaves limited room for improvisation, Burgess and Brannon’s experiences as Black gay men makes them uniquely capable of drawing out humor and insight from Escola’s dialogue that I believe Escola, or most non-Black Queer audience members like Wontorek, even realized was there(9). Mary and her husband’s relationship now treats the audience to a critique of tropes like Black actors in drag, the influence of the Black church on Black Queer identity and familial relationships, the legacy of normative displays of Black Masculinity on chauvinism and homophobia, and stereotypes about Black men on the DL; it’s only through these two actors’ brilliant performances and capacity to adapt their timing and inflection to the humor in Escola’s dialogue that makes this revelation and reinterpretation possible.

    Oh, Mary! was written by Cole Escola for Cole Escola.  While Escola spoke publicly about their dream of having Burgess takeover the role (something they didn’t even conceive of as likely when they speculated about it for a podcast during the Off-Broadway run[10]), Mary’s backstory is a reflection of Escola’s experiences as a cabaret performer.  So we might ask ourselves, where does the Blackness in Escola’s writing come from?

Burgess in costume, running through “Oh, Mary!” during a recent rehearsal.Credit...Emilio Madrid

    Brannon and Burgess do not change Escola’s dialogue substantially, if at all.  Eschewing pandering stereotypes for close parody and sarcasm, the two actors dredge up the unconscious-subtext within Escola’s dialogue to make frequent coded gestures towards the no-longer-hidden impact of minstrel performance on the show.  They linger in the moments where Mary and her husband toss barbs and slights at each other; making their knowing shared glances sites for the unearthing of Black humor during their tenure leading the production.  I don’t think the performance is subtle, but I think the closer one is to Blackness, the more of their humor you’re likely to understand and react to.

   An argument could be made between marginalized experiences, drawing comparisons between Escola’s experiences as Queer and non-binary to Brannon and Burgess’s experience with Blackness, this would be a misreading of where the Blackness of Oh, Mary! resides.

    In the finale, Burgess is able to slip the bonds of the script, dispose of any subtlety, and throw the legacy of minstrelsy into our faces with hilarious and profound effects.  The show ends with what the script describes as a “madcap medley” of songs which best express “Mary’s journey” and feel “true” to the actor performing them.  This leaves the choice of songs in the medley up to the performers; within the confines of the shows budget and capacity to get the rights to use the music.

    In Escola’s medley, Escola mixes in songs like “I’m a Little Teapot” and “She’ll Be Coming ‘round the Mountain” with 20th century piano bar classics like “American Pie,” “Her Name is Lola,” and “The Lady Is a Tramp” in a pun laden romp worthy of a vaudeville showcase.

    Burgess’s rendition of the ‘madcap medley’ is more physical than Escola’s performance.  And while Burgess’s slapstick humor makes for a more commanding display of raw energy and mastery of the stage, Burgess only ever briefly gives us a glimpse of his exceptional singing talent.  In his choice not to use a skill, not to give us everything, while still leaving “everything” on the stage come curtain call, Burgess creates a restrained tension that left me breathless and still heaving with laughter.  I choked and coughed on my own empty lungs much to the chagrin of the people sitting around me.

Color in image has been intentional changed due to the nature of its origin.

    Both are playful, but while Escola is clever, witty, and nimble, Burgess is handing a mostly white audience a copy of Mules and Men and seeing if they can read and understand it(11).  Burgess leans into the rights free American folk music(12) deviating only slightly from Escola’s song selection.  The addition of “Camptown Racers” by Burgess did not go unnoticed by the Black members of the audience.  It’s so utterly perfect, so on the nose; I’m truly at a loss for words.  Burgess has undoubtedly mastered a style of clowning and slapstick that makes for a kind of reclaimed ‘nouveau-minstrelsy’ humor which I find deeply appealing.  It recalls the layers of parody found in the cakewalk; American slaves parodying their slave masters, then having their parody misunderstood by their slave masters and turned into a mockery of Black slaves only to then be performed by Black artists in blackface for white audiences.  It’s a kind of multi-leveled humor that 4Chan wished it had invented.

    For a moment, Burgess has created a micro-screwball comedy and snuck humor past the financiers of Broadway and outsmarted the post-Gamergate “Hays Code” of self-censorship. It’s fucking brilliant.  That is the defining characteristic of nouveau-minstrelsy and why I think it’s so brilliant.  It’s humor whose layers of mockery and misunderstanding, coding and encoding, and appropriation, adaptation, and reclamation run so deep that Foucault’s understanding of Las Meninas isn’t ready to fully engage with yet.  But unlike classical minstrelsy, the steps between appropriation and reclamation do not necessarily run through projects of hegemony and malice.  Escola is not crafting a minstrel figure to mock Black arts and its performers, they see themself in these figures, but cannot point out where or how that came to be.

    My boyfriend pointed out that there is a worthy comparison between the absurdist humor of Oh, Mary! and the works of William Inge, Edward Albee, Tennessee Williams, and Christopher Durang.  The contrast between their reception by audiences and critics and the deserved lauding of Escola’s writing, is a show of how Queer playwrights have been able to be seen for their brilliance without needing to wade through a quagmire of controversy, but can the same be said of Queer Black actors, especially comedians?  Is there a place for the nouveau-minstrel?

From Broadway.com

    Audra McDonald is brilliantly leading a largely Black cast is the revival of Stephen Sondheim, Jule Styne, and Aurthur Laurent’s Gypsy to great effect; her casting has radically shifted the meaning of the show in ways that Sondheim would certainly not understand.  In contrast, in 2017 the Albee estate denied the rights for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf to be played with a Black actor as Nick(13).  I genuinely don’t know if I would actually enjoy seeing Martha call Nick a “houseboy” in that context, but I am certainly interested to see what it would do to an audience.

    I’m not interested in authorial intent.  Burgess can masterfully perform Escola’s self-insert and craft something uniquely his while performing Escola's story; this is not the unadulterated intent of the playwright, even if it is proximal to it.  In the current zeitgeist of Broadway Theater, there is an unwritten line somewhere about when it is, or isn’t, appropriate to cast Black actors in roles that allow them to make text out of the subtext (subconscious or unconscious) of white playwrights.  In most cases, reminding the largely white wealthy Broadway audience of the legacy of minstrelsy is certainly on the far side of that line.  It’s subversion informs why A Goofy Movie is an Black cult classic or why Snagglepuss and Huckleberry Hound are the perfect pair to play put upon gay novelists in Exit, Stage Left!: The Snagglepuss Chronicles.

    In their performance, Brannon and Burgess do something I think Lin-Manuel Miranda couldn’t imagine in Hamilton, they actually let two more negroes into the White House.  Miranda’s self congratulatory version of Black America is too sterile for nouveau-minstrelsy; now I’m wondering if Miranda went to the Met Gala.  I wonder what he thinks of the Black Dandy exhibition.  I, like Escola, won’t be bothered to do the research.

    “God, dammit!” says my imaginary strawman white liberal, as Burgess, Brannon, Escola and Ricamora look on from the wings and giggle before their curtain call.

Citations:

Barone, Joshua. “Review: ‘Oh, Mary!’ Turns an Unhinged Bit Into Real Theater.” The New York Times, February 27, 2024, sec. Theater. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/27/theater/oh-mary-cole-escola-review.html.

“Cole Escola on Doing No Research for Oh, Mary! And Performing in Front of Steven Spielberg.” Late Night with Seth Meyers. NBC, May 8, 2024. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUl-vUXkBF4.

Henderson, Kathy. “Phillip James Brannon Is Oh, Mary!’s New Abraham Lincoln, and His Family Sees the Resemblance.” Broadway.com, February 15, 2025. https://www.broadway.com/buzz/205192/phillip-james-brannon-is-oh-marys-new-abraham-lincoln-and-his-family-sees-the-resemblance/.

Hetrick, Adam. “Albee Estate Clarifies Position on Casting Controversy Surrounding Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” Playbill, August 24, 2017. https://playbill.com/article/albee-estate-clarifies-position-on-casting-controversy-surrounding-whos-afraid-of-virginia-woolf.

King, Darryn. “Betty Gilpin Takes Over the Title Role in Cole Escola’s Oh, Mary! Tonight.” Broadway.com, January 21, 2025. https://www.broadway.com/buzz/205098/betty-gilpin-takes-over-the-title-role-in-cole-escolas-oh-mary-tonight/.

Wontorek, Paul. “Tituss Burgess on Making Cole Escola’s Oh, Mary! Dream Cast Come True and Returning to Broadway on His Own Terms.” Broadway.com, March 18, 2025. https://www.broadway.com/buzz/205374/tituss-burgess-on-making-cole-escolas-oh-mary-dream-cast-come-true-and-returning-to-broadway-on-his-own-terms/.

End Notes:

1 “Cole Escola on Doing No Research for Oh, Mary! And Performing in Front of Steven Spielberg.” Late Night with Seth Meyers. NBC, May 8, 2024. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUl-vUXkBF4.

2 Yes, that is how the show titles the character; not Aberham Lincoln, but rather Mary’s Husband; in fact all characters are titled “Mary’s _____.”

3 Barone, Joshua. “Review: ‘Oh, Mary!’ Turns an Unhinged Bit Into Real Theater.” The New York Times, February 27, 2024, sec. Theater.

4 King, Darryn. “Betty Gilpin Takes Over the Title Role in Cole Escola’s Oh, Mary! Tonight.” Broadway.com, January 21, 2025.

5 Henderson, Kathy. “Phillip James Brannon Is Oh, Mary!’s New Abraham Lincoln, and His Family Sees the Resemblance.” Broadway.com, February 15, 2025.

6 Best known, by me, for playing D’Fwan in 30 Rock and Titus Andromedon in The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt; Burgess is an multi-time Emmy nominated and deeply accomplished Broadway, television, and film actor.

7 Vietmeier, Alex, dir. 2024. “Cole Escola on Doing No Research for Oh, Mary! And Performing in Front of Steven Spielberg.” Late Night with Seth Meyers. NBC.

8 Wontorek, Paul. “Tituss Burgess on Making Cole Escola’s Oh, Mary! Dream Cast Come True and Returning to Broadway on His Own Terms.” Broadway.com, March 18, 2025. 

9 Before I saw Burgess and Brannon,I saw the play twice with Escola and Ricmora; during their Off-Broadway run and during their Broadway run.

10 Barone, Joshua. “Tituss Burgess in ‘Oh, Mary!’ Is Cole Escola’s Dream Come True.” The New York Times, March 18, 2025, sec. Theater.

11 They probably can’t.

12 I imagine this is because of the limitations of budget for the show; rights for songs performed in broadway musicals are exceptionally expensive and Burgess’s run was only six weeks long.

13 Hetrick, Adam. “Albee Estate Clarifies Position on Casting Controversy Surrounding Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” Playbill, August 24, 2017.