Escola plays Mary Todd Lincoln in the play Oh, Mary, which won two Tony Awards…
Jazz hands were in full effect last night as the Tony Awards honoured New York’s theatre industry. Hosted by Wicked’s Cynthia Erivo, the night saw memorable performances, reunions and a historic win by performer Cole Escola.
Escola, star of the play Oh, Mary, became the first openly non-binary winner in the Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role in a Play for their role as Mary Todd Lincoln. The performer beat out the likes of two-time Academy Award winner George Clooney, Daniel Dae Kim, Harry Lennix, Jon Michael Hill and Louis McCartney.
Escola ran to the stage in a “Cinderella blue” coloured gown with a curly red wig, a homage to a look worn by Bernadette Peters during the 1999 Tony Awards. They accepted the award from actresses Sarah Paulson and Jean Smart, which viewer @hashtag_niko called on X, “the gay climax of Pride Month.”
In their speech, Escola opened by noting Julie Harris also won a Tony for playing Mary Todd Lincoln in 1976 for the play The Last of Mrs. Lincoln. They went on to say “hi” to their mother, thanked the other nominees and cast as well as a mysterious person from Grindr. “I want to thank… the most important people in my life, my friends who are here tonight, Jeffrey, Jen, Ben, everyone watching at home. Christian, Dakota, the whole gang, John, Claudia, oh and T-Bone from Grindr and Amy Sedaris, who always reminds me how important she is to me.”
The play went into the night with five nominations including Best Play. Aside from Escola’s win Sam Pinkleton won for Best Direction of a Play, and thanked Escola for teaching him to “Do what you love, not what you think people want to see.”
Oh, Mary opened last July and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The stage play is a dark comedy about a miserable, suffocated Mary Todd Lincoln in the weeks leading up to Abraham Lincoln’s assassination and examines her forgotten life and dreams in an 80 minute, one-act play.
“I had the idea of what if Abraham Lincoln’s assassination wasn’t such a bad thing for Mary Todd, and then I sort of worked my way backwards from that and thought about what she might have wanted, and what’s the stupidest possible thing she could’ve wanted, which I landed on being a cabaret star,” Escola told CBS News New York, shortly after receiving their Tony Awards nomination.
The Tony’s had plenty of fun 2SLGBTQI+ moments and wins throughout the night. Two-time RuPaul’s Drag Race winner Jinkx Monsoon performed with the cast of Pirates! The Penzance Musical to such a rapturous applause that you could barely hear the queen sing.
Megan Hilty of Death Becomes Her: The Musical performed the campy number Do It For The Gaze, which was an explosion of colour.
Actor Jak Malone was one of the first winners of the night winning Best Performance by an Actor in a Featured Role in a Musical for Operation Mincemeat: A New Musical, a musical comedy based on a real World War Two British deception operation. Malone played Hester May Murray Leggatt, a British MI5 employee part of the operation. In his speech he said, “The last thing I wanted to say is this: eight times a week, I walk out on that stage and tell the audience that I am a woman. If you watched our show and found yourself believing in Hester, well then, I am so glad to tell you that intentionally or otherwise you might have just bid farewell to cynicism, to outdated ideas, to that rotten old binary and opened yourself up to a world that is already out there in glorious technicolour and isn’t going away anytime soon.”
For Michael Arden, winner of Best Direction of a Musical for the heartfelt robot adventure Maybe Happy Ending, he ended his speech the best way possible. “And if there are any queer people watching tonight. Happy Pride.”
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