For the last few months, Broadway’s oldest continually operating legitimate theatre, the Lyceum, has reverberated with the raucous laughter of sell-out houses attending Cole Escola’s Oh, Mary! Having made its award-winning debut downtown at the Lucille Lortel earlier this year, the irreverent, colourful—and very queer—reimagining of historical figures, centred around a petulant, heavy-drinking, frustrated cabaret performer, who happens to be the 16th US President’s First Lady, Mary Todd Lincoln (Escola), continues to be the theatrical talk of the town. With a second extension just announced, the laughter is set to continue until at least January 19th, 2025.
A key ingredient in the show’s success is its terrific five-member cast, who all originated their roles Off-Broadway, including Bianca Leigh as Mary’s mistreated but endearingly upbeat chaperone, Louise, whom the actress describes as “the epitome of 19th century womanhood”. She also takes on a second character, Bill, a bartender at a divey Washington saloon frequented by the closeted President (Fire Island’s Conrad Ricamora). Rounding out the cast are James Scully (Problemista) as Mary’s dashing acting coach and Tony Macht as Abe’s obliging assistant, and the object of his lust. Read our ★★★★★ of Oh, Mary!
On screen, Bianca Leigh played Mary Ellen in Duncan Tucker’s Oscar-nominated Transamerica, a role which nearly two decades on, Escola had not forgotten and helped lead to Leigh being cast in Oh, Mary! She portrayed Karma Johnstone alongside Bianca Del Rio in the 2016 comedy movie Hurricane Bianca and its sequel Hurricane Bianca: From Russia with Hate, and shared her experience of navigating the entertainment business as an openly trans actress in Sam Feder’s GLAAD and GALECA award-winning documentary Disclosure, produced by Laverne Cox, which world premiered at Sundance 2020.
On stage, Leigh’s past performances include The Nap at Manhattan Theatre Club, Frannie Halcyon in Tales of the City: The Musical on Broadway, Time/Wind in Taylor Mac’s The Lily’s Revenge, and Tatiana in Trans Scripts, Part 1: The Women. She can be heard as Jerri in the Audible recording of Shakina’s Chonburi International Hotel and Butterfly Club. Leigh is also a seasoned cabaret artist and stand-up comedian, and her writing includes Orla in Overheard: Fourteen Monologues commissioned by the Breaking the Binary Festival.
On a recent show day, Bianca Leigh took the time to speak exclusively with The Queer Review’s editor James Kleinmann about establishing her theatre career in New York’s downtown scene, becoming involved in Oh, Mary!, the experience of being part of such a major Broadway success, what it is like to share the stage with Escola, and her take on how to approach auditions.
James Kleinmann, The Queer Review: when did the performer in you first emerge and how did it manifest?
Bianca Leigh: “I can remember being in my high chair and performing for my family! There was a cartoon character at the time, a dog who’d get given a dog biscuit, jump up in the air in ecstasy at the taste of it, and then float down and go, ‘Mmmm!’ So when they were giving me finger food, or whatever they give babies, I was trying to do this bit. They were seeing this toddler go, ‘Mmmm!’ And I got a laugh. So I did it again and I got another laugh. I was doing this cartoon dog and they thought I was just being a baby, but little did they know that was the beginning!”
“Later, my sister and I went to dance class together. When there was a local production of Gypsy and they needed kids for the Uncle Jocko’s talent show scene, they came to our dance school to recruit us. I played this little baby tap dancer and I can remember it like it was yesterday: the excitement of “places” being called; waiting behind the curtain and then curtain going up; the lights and the audience and the laughter. I was hooked. That was it.”
“To think it was Gypsy is so funny. If one show is going to be your first, that’s the one to be in because it’s the greatest musical ever written. It’s certainly the best book. I would watch it from backstage. There’s a scene with the burlesque strippers, “You Gotta Get a Gimmick”, and back then I didn’t understand that they were supposed to be blousy and broken down. I certainly didn’t get the idea from it that there was anything wrong with stripping.”
“I was very taken with the fun of it and the whole thing of Gypsy being this elegant stripper with her long white gloves. I didn’t see the tragic side of it at all. I was too young to understand that this woman was kidnapping children to be in her vaudeville act and that the burlesque strippers were supposed to be sad. Something that I’ve lived and observed is the spirit that these women have. That sense of, ‘Okay, I’m in a second or third rate burlesque house, but I’m on a stage and I’m going to give it my all!’ They all had their gimmick and they took very seriously what they were putting out there.”
As you say, what an amazing first show to be part of and it’s just about to open up again on Broadway.
“I want to be Tessie Tura! But I’m sure they’ve cast it by now and I’m already in my own Broadway show!”
You can’t run from theatre to theatre and you only have one night off a week.
“Yeah, exactly!”
You graduated from Rutgers Mason Gross School of Arts with an MFA in Acting in 1980s. What was the New York downtown theatre scene like when you arrived in the city as you were establishing your career?
“When I got to New York, I was highly trained, I’d been in a lot of shows and I was ready, but I was told, ‘If you transition they’re not going to want anything to do with you. They don’t want to deal with it’. And that is what happened. I faced a wall. The legitimate theatre wanted nothing to do with trans actors. There were a couple of girls who managed to work stealth, but I was just beginning my transition and I have a big mouth so there no way that I could keep that secret.”
“I was fortunate that there was a rather thin layer of theatre that was funded. It wasn’t a lot, but you did get paid, and you were working with amazing people. So I managed to find a lot of employment at places like La MaMa, PS122, and Theater For the New City. I did several productions with Taylor Mac, which was a dream come true. Taylor’s pronouns are judy. I love judy and working with judy. I also worked with Absolute Theatre and Theatre Askew. It was what you would call downtown queer theatre and I was fortunate to have that because the higher profile professional theatre was closed to me for 25 years before I managed to get into it, as was film and television.”
“When shows are funded and they don’t have to worry about ticket sales, they can cast who they want. There’s no pressure to have names. The scripts can be as innovative, as avant-garde, as upside down, and as political as they want. So it was extremely exciting and free. It’s pure theatre. You’re not answering to anyone. I wanted to come to New York to be a great Shakespearean actress. Actually, I wanted to do everything, but I was classically trained and I really wanted to get involved in classical theatre, but I ended up being in the most avant-garde, modern, crazy, cutting-edge stuff. And I loved it.”
“Having come from a more formal training and having done so many of the classics, I loved being involved in that world and being able to add my experience to the mix. What’s great is you’re more of a collaborator in those kinds of pieces. For instance, with someone like Taylor Mac there were many things that I would come up with in rehearsal that I would improvise and judy would say, ‘Keep it. Do it. Put it in!’ Cole Escola has certainly been like that too, but when you’re dealing with a script like, Oh, Mary! you don’t want to mess with it, so it wasn’t highly collaborative like the things downtown back then.”
“At that time, they had what you would call “male actresses” like Charles Ludlum, Charles Busch, and Everett Quinton, who were gay men who often played female roles. Even though I was at the beginning of my transition, some people assumed that’s sort of what I would be doing. But I never really managed to get into those companies or into that world. Although none of the people I just mentioned said this to me, people around them said to me more than once, ‘If you’re a girl, it’s not funny anymore’. So that was another place where I was shut out of. It’s not like they had my name on the bulletin board: ‘Don’t let this bitch audition’, but it was seen as something that wouldn’t really work or at least that’s how it was expressed to me by several people in that scene. I’m a great friend of Charles Busch, and I worked with Everett Quinton after many years. He was a neighbour and a wonderful man.”
“There were a lot of women writing feminist plays back then that were breaking down the patriarchy; there was the queer stuff; there were a lot of people of colour becoming part of the downtown scene and embracing that freedom. The stuff that would come out of the drag scene, at places like Boy Bar and Jackie 60, was completely cutting-edge. They weren’t only impersonating celebrities and pop stars, they were writing skits and parodies and plays. People were taking things and turning them on their head. The drag balls and the sense of performance was very exciting because so many of us were outside of the mainstream.”
“It was a very different time. Unfortunately, many of the people I met then passed during the height of the AIDS epidemic. Who knows what Charles Ludlum would have written if he’d lived. It is odd that we’ve moved on. I don’t know if we forget, but there’s another generation now and they’re involved in where they’re coming from. I’m not even sure if a lot of them realize that there was a lost generation. Thousands and thousands of artists died and we almost had to start over in some ways.”
Let’s come forward to Oh, Mary! When and how did you first become involved in the show?
“In February 2023, I was asked to do a developmental table read at the CAA offices. I’d heard of Cole because they were very loved and respected in the community as this brilliant comic and had done so well at Joe’s Pub and in all these amazing videos. I knew they’d done a lot of work on cable as a writer and as a performer, but I’d never met them before. When I went in, we read it twice and the producers were there so I knew something was going to happen. I knew right away that there was something very special about it, I think we all knew, but what’s happening now was beyond our wildest dreams.”
“After that, I was unofficially attached and then a year later I got the offer to do the show Off-Broadway at the Lucille Lortel Theatre. In the rehearsal room you almost heard a click, it was almost audible. I knew that this was the right cast and the right script at the right time. The creative team was perfect. I even love our producers. I adore each of them. They’re fantastic and they believed in the project from the beginning.”
“We got great reviews and it was selling out. There are only 300 seats at the Lortel, so people were complaining that they couldn’t get tickets. I’m old enough to know that if people are making money, they’ll want to keep making money. So we extended for a couple of weeks and then we extended five more weeks and then another week, but we couldn’t extend anymore because the Lortel had to close to repair their air conditioning system. It was May and it was starting to get hot in those hoop skirts and corsets and wigs!”
“We were called into a meeting and told that we were going to Broadway. Of course, we all screamed and jumped up and down like kids. After we finished at the Lortel we had a month off and then we went back into the rehearsal room.”
How did you go about shaping the character of Louise?
“Louise is a fascinating character to me. She’s integral to the plot and she’s the only other female character in play, so how Mary interacts with another woman is important. The scenes are very quick and they’re highly energetic. Louise doesn’t have time. She’s on, then she’s off, and sometimes she has to go from utter bliss to a broken heart to raging anger in seconds. So I had to learn how to turn on a dime. That’s my challenge. But I’m an experienced actress, a thespian, so I figured out how to do it and I do it!”
“At one point, Louise says something like, her ‘heart is flapping like a hummingbird’. Well, she’s a hummingbird herself! My characters usually have a lot more edge and sophistication to them. At the Lortel, Louise 1.0 would see things coming a little bit. On Broadway, Louise 2.0 is very much the same character, except she is not sophisticated. She is a true believer in the goodness of the world. She absolutely adores Mary and does not see the curmudgeonly side of her until the penny finally drops. There’s no worldliness to her at all. It’s complete love and adoration and then, boom, she realizes, ‘You’re not my friend’.”
“So that was an adjustment for me. I had to get more into the happy and the positive side of things. Sometimes my preparation for going on stage as Louise is watching videos of puppies and kittens! She has to be that hopeful and that innocent and I’ve grown to love her very much. Some of the reviews describe her as prim and prissy. Okay, if that’s how you experienced her from an audience point of view that’s fine, but to me, she’s the epitome of 19th century womanhood.”
“In earlier drafts of the script it was specified that Louise was Abraham Lincoln’s cousin, so the concept was that she was brought in, like an early version of a PR team or a spin doctor, to soften Mary. It was like, the President’s wife is problematic—she has a temper, she hangs out in dive bars, she wants to perform in public—and so Louise is brought in to teach her how to do watercolors and embroidery and respectable pursuits for a 19th century lady. Louise does her best and she does it with love. I think she has a big old girl crush on Mary and she wants Mary to sleepover so they can braid each other’s hair and make s’mores together and talk about boys. But that’s not how Mary sees it.”
“When we went back into rehearsal we only had a week, which was enough for a show that we’d already done 120 times. We were just tweaking and fine-tuning things. They very much wanted the same show, our director Sam Pinkleton was adamant about that. To paraphrase, he was telling us that the one thing the show didn’t need was any more jokes. It’s non-stop laughter. So Sam was like, ‘Stop trying to be so funny because you all already have your moments built into the script’.”
“There is one point where Mary embarrasses me terribly in front of the President after promising not to. One night, as Louise was going through her conniption and thinking, ‘Should I run out of the room? Should I hide under the desk?’ I started to faint as Louise and then I caught myself. The next night, Sam said, ‘When Louise almost fainted last night, that was hilarious. Don’t do it. We don’t need it.'”
“Even though Cole is the playwright and the lead, Cole would very much listen to Sam if he’d say, ‘Don’t do that funny voice here, this scene is straight and it’s very fast-paced’. Sam would encourage us all not to let any air in between our lines and to come in on the laugh and not to wait. I think a lot of the success of the show has to do with the pace. Obviously, they love the script and they adore Cole. People seem to think that we are a strong ensemble that works very well together and I would agree. If I do say so myself!”
“When we were preparing to go to Broadway, what could we do besides trying to be funny? Go deeper. Sam was like, ‘Let’s raise the stakes and make sure we know what these people want and what happens if they don’t get it and deepen the relationships’. So I was pushed in that direction. There are moments where I would make a funny voice, like I’d go up on the word ‘manure’, but Sam would say, ‘No, this moment is real. If you allow your heart to be broken, if you open up and you feel it, the audience will feel it too.”
“So I thought about it and then I said, ‘So you want me to act?’ It might as well be Mourning Becomes Electra from an acting preparation standpoint. We take it deadly seriously and the reason it’s funny is because of the circumstances, some of the dialogue, and the way these people express themselves. It becomes hilarious, but we have to really act it. Not that we weren’t acting it downtown, but we decided that the only thing we could really add to it was a little more depth”.
Comedy is often unfairly underrated compared to drama, so it’s pleasing to see critics and audiences appreciating all those aspects of Oh, Mary! Sam’s direction is so beautifully calibrated and the energy that you all pass back and forth between you as a cast is incredible. Most of your scenes are with Cole and I love the dynamics between Mary and Louise, what is it like to create that on-stage relationship with Cole?
“I spend a lot of my interviews praising Cole, but it’s all true. When I was in school, they’d say that the most important person is your scene partner. As a kid, I was like, ‘Whatever. I could act with a broomstick.’ And I have! But it really is true. You’re out there and it’s like being on a trapeze. You try to give your scene partner the reassurance of, ‘I’m here. I will catch you. Go for it.’ And vice versa. To know that it’s the two of you out there and that you have each other’s back is powerful. As the curtain goes up, there are 900 people out there going, ‘Alright, what’s so great about this?’ Over the years, I’ve put more and more of my focus on the other actor and on the other character. We’ve also carved out a few moments between Louise and the President which are very precious to me.”
“I once called Cole ‘our fearless leader’ and they were like, ‘Okay, now!’ But it really is true. If I feel tired having eight shows a week, I see Cole doing it with this huge role and singing and never complaining. It is inspiring and it’s great to see somebody as an actor who never half-asses it. We’re out there and we’re in the moment, we are available, and we’re interacting. It is a thrill to work with someone so talented. If my line reading is slightly different one night, Cole will instantly adjust and I think that’s amazing. This person is super sensitive. Things will happen in the audience that I don’t notice, but Cole is so present as Mary, but also aware that there was an argument over here in the orchestra and one person left to go to the bathroom over there.”
There’s no intermission, so folks should go to the bathroom before.
“Yes, there’s no intermission, but it’s very quick and I love that. There are some significant exceptions—like a Taylor Mac play that I was in which was five hours long and people loved it—but for the most part, I think stuff needs to be much quicker. Get to the point because you don’t want the audience to get restless and to start looking at their watches.”
I loved hearing that Cole saw you in Transamerica and always remembered you from that.
“There was a group dressing room at the Lortel and one night I was telling someone how I got involved in Oh, Mary! I was saying it was because Sam Pinkleton is family and that I’ve also worked with his husband, Andrew Russell, many times. I was in a show in repertory that Sam did the movement for. Also, Henry Russell Bergstein is a casting director whom I’ve auditioned for many times. So I assumed it was because of those connections. But Cole turned to me and said, ‘No, it was me!’ I said, ‘But we’ve never met’. They said, ‘I saw you in Transamerica when I was 18 and I’ve followed you ever since’. So I said, ‘What took you so long?! It’s been 20 years now!’ No, I didn’t say that, but that’s another reason I adore them. Here is this dazzlingly talented human being who wrote the show, stars in the show, inspires us, keeps us going, and they gave me the gig, or at least threw my name in the ring.”
“When people ask what advice I would give to young actors it would be to not think of auditions as job interviews. Think of them as an acting class. It’s another chance to act and to learn and to interpret text and to work in front of a camera. Think of it as a chance for the casting director to get to know you a little better. When you’re young, every audition you go, ‘Oh, my God, I would love this part. This would make such a difference’. It is hard when you’re auditioning for something that could potentially change your life, but on a day-to-day basis you have to realize that the numbers are astronomical. It’s the lotto and you have got to keep playing every day and not get too worked up about it.”
“I auditioned for a role on a medical TV show once. It was for this woman who was painting the lobby of the hospital. When I went in to the casting, all the other women there auditioning looked like painters! You have to be really right for the part. I would like casting directors to have more imagination and be like, ‘Bianca could play the quirky coroner!’ With Oh, Mary! there are not many actresses that I know who could do the period style, the heightened speech of a 19th century lady, and the slapstick, rubber face queerness of it. I’m sure that there are a few, but most of those are big stars and they’re not available.”
“One thing that I hear over and over again from casting directors and directors is that they immediately know when someone is right for a role. I was talking to Brad Falchuk and he told me that when they were casting Pose, the minute Dominique Jackson walked into the room they knew they’d found Elektra, before she’d even opened her mouth. I had said for a long time that no one else could have done that role. Of course, other people could have done it, but it was the perfect marriage of actor and role. I got notes from the producers on opening night that said, ‘The minute you walked into that table read we knew that was Louise’. So hang on in there. It’s got to be the right role at the right time.”
I can’t imagine anyone else playing Louise, you’re so perfectly cast.
“Thank you. And no one else ever will!”
What is it like for you to be on the receiving end of that much laughter when you’re performing Oh, Mary!?
“I’ve been a comic actress for a long time and I’ve done stand-up and cabaret, so laughter is my oxygen. We did get a lot of laughs at the Lortel obviously, but when we transferred, the first time we went out on that stage we weren’t sure if were we going to be able to fill it. There are similarities to the Lortel, like the width of the stage and it’s not a deep theatre, so you can see the exit doors, but it goes way up and there’s a second mezzanine, so it’s a cathedral-like space. But when that first performance started and we heard the reaction, it was amazing.”
“A lot of what Louise does is build these setups, step by step, and then when the payoff finally happens you can hear 900 people laughing at the same time. It’s phenomenal. I get goosebumps. I’m humble and I’m grateful. It’s spectacular and there is not a day that goes by where at some point my breath isn’t taken away and I say, ‘I can’t believe this is my life!’ I had a perfectly respectable resumé and body of work, but it doesn’t get better than this for the American theatre. It’s Broadway, it’s a hit show, and there are only five of us. We’re all working together as a team and it’s miraculous. It’s beyond my wildest dreams.”
“In the old movies they would say, ‘Pinch me, I must be dreaming!’ I always thought that was so stupid, but I’ve experienced that feeling many times during this year. I’ve been like, ‘This cannot be happening. This doesn’t happen in my life!’ I do good work, I’m pulled into projects where they need somebody to do some heavy lifting or somebody’s not available. I’m appreciated and I’m valued, but this doesn’t happen.”
“There have been many moments this year when I’ve said, ‘I’m going to wake up and it’s all going to be a dream. It’s a weird feeling. Sam would say, ‘How are you?’ And I’d be like, ‘I’m great, but I feel like a piano is going to drop on my head’. Because you think if something like this is happening, something horrible has to happen too, but you just keep going.”
But instead, you just got extended again.
“Yes, we got extended and we have a gig for several more months and I’ll have health insurance. I already qualified for six months and that’s wonderful. I’m trying to save money because there are always gaps.”
Because the show has a queer creator, as well as the overall feel of the piece, when it comes to narrative points like Lincoln being gay we’re very much in on the joke as queer people and not the butt of it. The comedy isn’t stemming from the fact that he’s gay, but it’s about his reaction to it. What’s it like being part of such an unapologetically queer show on Broadway?
“As I say, I write comic things myself and do stand-up, and I think, is it the worst thing in the world to joke about your own experience? Your own people? Some comedians say that they want to be able to make jokes about trans people. Well, I understand that you might feel frustrated, but isn’t it kind of punching down? I think the tradition of being a comic goes right back through to the jesters and that you should punch up. For queer people to write queer humour that can be very self-deprecating isn’t only more accurate, but it’s coming from lived experience.”
“I do feel that it is a safe space. There is one heterosexual person in the cast, whom we tolerate! But we’re just the cast. I asked Cole point blank, ‘Did you cast me because I’m trans?’ And they said, ‘No’. So I’m assuming a lot of it had to do with me fitting the part. But even if somebody says, ‘I want to cast as much family as possible. I want trans people, non-binary folks, gay men, lesbians, even a straight person’, then that’s great.”
“Actually, we do need a lesbian and we will get a lesbian at one point I promise you. Although I have to say, I’ve had more than one lesbian say that there is unresolved sexual tension between Louise and Mary. I don’t think Louise even knows that two women can get down. She didn’t even realize that she’d had an orgasm. The funny part of that speech is the ice cream, but the acting part is that I’m telling my dear Judy that this happened to me: ‘Girl, I saw stars’.”
“People did ask us, ‘Are you worried about how the audience and especially tourists are going to react?’ My answer is, ‘No’. Mae West wrote a play called Sex in 1927 and she sold out. There has been adult comedy on Broadway since the beginning. There was a little play called Oh! Calcutta! in the 70s and 80s. They were naked in Hair at one point. Also, if tourists are that homophobic or transphobic, they’re probably not coming to Broadway to begin with. It’s not like there are these MAGA Broadway devotees. And times have changed. Yes, we get a lot of family in the audience, but we get a lot of straight people too, and we get a lot of tourists. A guy got up once and was like, ‘Oh, that’s it!’ And he dragged his wife out of the theatre. He might have been expecting a very serious biographical piece, which it is not!”
“Maybe I’m naive, but I think the world has really changed. There is an incredible amount of hatred towards us coming from certain quarters, people who really want to push us not only back into the closet, but under a rock. But I think they’re a pretty slim minority that is going apeshit over our fuller participation in the world. When you read between the lines, that’s a lot of it. They’re like, ‘Okay, you do what you do to your body but don’t be on TV, don’t be in films, and don’t be on a beer can! Our existence in the public sphere is not acceptable to them. Sorry! This is the world. If you want to shelter your children, that’s fine, but a trans person on a beer can is not going to hurt your child, especially when your child has access to the Internet. That’s what you should be concerned about, not us participating in film and television or being on a beer can. Hi, Dylan! I love Dylan Mulvaney, by the way. She is so lovely and is now a dear friend of mine.”
She was just in Edinburgh with her autobiographical comedy musical which got some great reviews.
“How amazing! I was there in 1994 and then again in around 2015. I love Edinburgh. The queer people in Edinburgh are cutting-edge and getting into performance art and mixing genres and redefining everything from the ground up. I made so many great friends there. The first time I was there we were at the Traverse Theatre and we bombed. Although we managed to build up a good audience by the end. But the next time I went it was with Paul Lucas’s Trans Scripts and we were a hit. We got five-star reviews and awards and it was great. It was a big difference being the toast of Edinburgh. So I highly recommend it. But even if you’re just doing something on a street corner it’s a very exciting place to be during the festival and Edinburgh is a beautiful city.”
You did your own one-woman show at the Laurie Beechman Theater in New York at the end of August, Transvestigation, how would you describe it?
“I’ve approached cabaret from many different angles and this show is storytelling with a stand-up approach. Doing stand-up classes, I’m learning how to tell a fun and funny story. I always talk about being a trans kid because it was so insane. You don’t reach for a toy because you’re worried that you’re going to reach for the wrong one. All that is crazy. I talk about what it was like to grow up in the 70s, which was wild, right? Then I sing some songs. I love the standards. I like to have a good time with the audience and I get to wear a lot of makeup and dress in sequins, so very much the opposite to Louise in Oh, Mary!“
By James Kleinmann
Oh, Mary! has been extended at Broadway’s Lyceum Theatre through Sunday, January 19th, 2025. For more details and to purchase tickets head to ohmaryplay.com. Follow Oh, Mary! on Instagram @ohmaryplay and follow Bianca Leigh on Instagram @bianca_leigh2000. Read our ★★★★★ of Oh, Mary!