Cole Escola’s OH, MARY! was performing for the camera all along

Sam Pinkleton has said he fell in love with theatre as a child by wearing out VHS tapes of Cats and Into the Woods — an admission that locates the screen at the center of his theatrical imagination before the camera has fired a single frame. The logic now completes itself. The Tony Award and Olivier Award-winning play OH, MARY!, a dark comedy that has occupied Broadway and the West End for the better part of two years, will debut on HBO and stream on HBO Max as a filmed version of a West End performance directed for stage and screen by Pinkleton himself.

OH, MARY! was written and conceived by Cole Escola, who also stars as a miserable, suppressed, and chronically alcohol-consuming Mary Todd Lincoln in the weeks before Abraham Lincoln’s assassination. Escola’s stated thesis — offered with deliberate self-deprecation — is that the play “finally examines the forgotten life and dreams of Mrs. Lincoln, through the lens of an idiot,” that idiot being Escola themselves. The show runs 80 uninterrupted minutes, a formal compression that refuses the usual dramatic sprawl and drives everything through what Pinkleton calls “meticulously choreographed chaos.” At the 2025 Tony Awards, Escola took Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role in a Play — the first non-binary winner in that category — while Pinkleton won Best Direction of a Play. The Olivier Award committee offered its own recognition when the production transferred to the West End.

Trafalgar Theatre facade with OH MARY show banners on the West End marquee — The Trafalgar Theatre in London during the West End run of OH, MARY! / Photo: APK, CC BY 4.0

The filmed version, captured at the Trafalgar Theatre in London, preserves the original company intact. Escola plays Mary Todd Lincoln; Giles Terera, an Olivier Award winner himself, plays Mary’s Husband; Bianca Leigh plays Mary’s Chaperone; Tony Macht plays Mary’s Husband’s Assistant; and Emmy nominee Michael Urie plays Mary’s Teacher. Pinkleton directs the filmed capture, extending his directorial authority from stage to screen without the mediation of a separate film director — a structural choice that signals something about the nature of the material. The special is executive produced by Escola, Alex Bach, and Daniel Powell for Irony Point, alongside Carlee Briglia and Mike Lavoie for Mike & Carlee Productions, and Kevin McCollum and Lucas McMahon for Alchemation.

OH, MARY! opened Off Broadway before transferring to Broadway’s Lyceum Theatre, where it became the first production in the venue’s 121-year history to gross over $1 million in a single week — a record it has since broken fifteen times. It was also the first show of the 2024-25 Broadway season to recoup its investment. A West End premiere followed in December 2025, and a North American tour launches this month. The HBO Max release is scheduled for 2027.

The question a filmed theatrical event always raises is whether the camera catches or diminishes what the stage makes. Pinkleton, whose theatrical formation came partly through a screen, is the right person to answer it.

Tags: HBO, Broadway, West End, Cole Escola, filmed theater, Giles Terera