Review: What Makes ‘Oh, Mary!’ One of the Best Summer Comedies in Years

Like so many before them, members of the “Oh, Mary!” creative team are proudly reclaiming an insulting epithet as a badge of honor.

I don’t mean “queer”; they’re way past that. I mean “stupid.”

“Oh, Mary!” is “the stupidest play,” Cole Escola, its author and star, tells anyone who will listen.

“I have a huge hunger for deep stupidity,” Sam Pinkleton, its director, chimes in.

They protest too much. “Oh, Mary!” may be silly, campy, even pointless, but “stupid,” I think not. Rather, the play, which opened on Thursday at the Lyceum Theater, is one of the best crafted and most exactingly directed Broadway comedies in years. Which is a surprise on many levels, and on each level a gift.

To start with, we don’t get a lot of comedies these days, not the kind you can feel good laughing at. Most contemporary examples of the genre — say “Bootycandy” by Robert O’Hara and “Clybourne Park” by Bruce Norris — use the form the way doctors use an emetic: They want you to gag on the gags. But the totally unserious “Oh, Mary!” is not medicinal in that sense. It merely wants you to lose your breath guffawing, especially with a series of switchback shocks at the end, so cleverly conceived and executed they’re hilarious.

But the premise is already a joke. How else would you describe a back story in which Mary Todd Lincoln (Escola in a hoop skirt the size of a yurt) longs to return to her first love, cabaret, with its “madcap medleys” and built-in excuses for diva behavior?