Michelle Obama Knows People Want Her Opinion on FLOTUS Farce ‘Oh, Mary!’: ‘I Wasn’t Sure What Was Going On’

Michelle Obama left Broadway’s “Oh, Mary!” — the Tony-winning FLOTUS farce from playwright and star Cole Escola — wondering one thing: “Who thought of this?”

Swinging by Bowen Yang and Matt Rogers’ “Las Culturistas” podcast on Wednesday, the former first lady shared that she has indeed seen Escola’s alternate history comedy that envisions Abraham Lincoln’s wife, First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln, as a drunk, wannabe cabaret star. Obama shared went in blind but came out loving it.

“We imagine that everyone’s turning to you to see how you’re responding to this specific play,” Yang mused of Obama’s theater-going habits.

“A lot of times, I sneak in afterwards, so I don’t think that people knew I was there because I come in at dark, I slip in at the side and just sit,” she explained. “And I didn’t know fully what ‘Oh, Mary!’ was, right? So I went with a friend, and it was a recommendation. They said it was a play. And I didn’t do the research, which I usually do. So I wasn’t sure what was going on.”

But then the curtain opened up, the spotlight went on, and a curly-haired, hoop dress-clad Escola entered the stage in drunken hysteria.

“Scene 1, I am cracking up,” Obama recalled, but admitted that she was aware of how she was responding in the darkened audience. “[I was] feeling like, ‘Oh my god, if people see me laughing, it’s going to be on Page Six!’ But I loved it — so happy for the Tony win. I mean, you know, just out of your mind — this is when you think, ‘Who thought of this? What’s going inside that head that thought of retelling history in this very interesting but powerful way?’ Just, I loved it. Loved it.”

Rogers, a peer and friend of Escola, then shared that “Oh, Mary!” may read as a political farce, but it’s also very personal to its creator.

“And also when you get to know Cole, and you really realize that so much of their actual personal experience is in that show even if you don’t know — like, the things that they’ve struggled with and what they’ve wanted and the kind of resistance they’ve been met with is all in there.”

“In the bones of Mary Todd Lincoln,” Obama quipped, later adding: “I had a great time.”

The hot-ticketed Broadway production is fresh off a number of Tony Award wins, including a history-making win for Cole Escola, who became the first nonbinary performer to win Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role in a Play. The production announced Wednesday that “RuPaul’s Drag Race” icon-turned-Broadway regular Jinkx Monsoon will take over the role of Mary Todd Lincoln in August.

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