Oh, Mary! Oh, Michael!

A rummage through my jumble box of cultural highlights from this week!

Oh Mary!

First, apologies for failing to post on Friday; I usually find some time on a Thursday evening to put some words together but on Thursday evening I was at the Trafalgar theatre to see Oh Mary! with a girlfriend.

If you’re new to Oh Mary! it’s billed as a revisionist dark comedy presenting the wife of Abraham Lincoln (Mary Todd) as a gin-soaked, cabaret-obsessed diva with ambitions for the stage. It charts the days before Lincoln’s assassination in a theatre through Mary’s eyes and offers us a closeted gay president in love with the actor John Wilkes Booth, by whose hand history tells us he is set to die.

As assassinations in theatres go, this one’s a doozy.

The figure assassinated is poor Mary. I write this understanding that there will be few who agree with me. Certainly the audience on Thursday loved the camp brashness of it all, the lewd gags, punchlines that signalled their arrival ten minutes ahead of time and the vibe which was very much serving panto.

At this point I want to make it clear I did laugh. Catherine Tate was playing Mary and she brought her full portfolio of comedy skills to the role, with the ghosts of her Catherine Tate show characters flitting from scene to scene. She was very funny. But did I like the show? No, not really. Not in a West End theatre. Not at those prices.

I might have enjoyed it more in a small venue at the Fringe where it would have been a little piece of silliness; a ridiculous idea turned into a piece of theatre. Even then I might have questioned the hijacking of a woman whose story is already barely known by an English audience, for sure, and distorting it further for laughs. Mary Todd lost three sons - one aged 3, one aged 11 and the third aged 18. Her Victorian society deemed her ‘hysterical,’ that word reserved for women’s behaviour. ‘Unhinged’ is how she’s been described since then. Just putting this out there, if I’d lost three sons I doubt I’d behave in a rational way, and yes, if a male doctor offered me laudanum, I may just have taken it.

Until Catherine Tate took on the role of Mary last week, it was played in the UK by Mason Alexander Park having been originated and written by American actor Cole Escola, both male performers presenting shrieking hysteria and vanity as comedy, and offering a cartoon version of a woman already maligned by history. Catherine Tate has stepped into this drag role as a woman, and I guess that changes the dynamic favourably; there is a sense of agency in her - no spoilers - achieving her ambition to perform cabaret and she is very funny. But the fact that a woman performs the caricature doesn't automatically redeem the caricature. The audience still laughs at the same things. They still go away with a primary memory of Mary as a drunk (no evidence that she even touched alcohol), a hysterical mess (she was grief stricken and consigned to an asylum later in her life by her son who found her dysregulation inconvenient) and aspired to perform on stage (her ambitions lay in politics) and that seems to me to make her the victim of a different kind of modern male oppression.

I’ve probably overthought this, haven’t I? My feminism is instinctive. I don’t know which wave it sits in, I just felt very unsettled about this whole show which felt to me to have cruelty at its heart. I wish I could just join in with all the celebrities who’ve celebrated this as high camp, queer revisionism but I’m just left wondering if intellectual gaslighting is a thing. Poor fucking Mary.

Oh Michael!

My feelings about the biopic Michael - part of the story of the life of Michael Jackson - are much more straightforward. Anna and I went to see this on Tuesday evening having watched the BBC docu-series currently available on iplayer.

A partial story that does not refer to any of the allegations of child sexual abuse, it feels highly manipulative of the viewing audience. Joe Jackson, Michael’s father, is instead cast in the role of villain of the piece, and there is no doubt that the man was pretty monstrous, but in terms of deflection and distraction, it’s an overt ploy: “Look over there!”

Along with the absence of child sex abuse allegations is the absence of Janet Jackson. All the other siblings feature, but not Janet. Turns out she declined an offer to participate and requested instead that she not be portrayed in the film. I like her the more for this. Similarly, while Prince Jackson is named as Executive Producer, Paris Jackson has completely distanced herself from the project, with a ‘Not my monkeys, not my circus,’ comment on social media.

And so to monkeys… Or chimpanzees to be accurate. We’ve already had a scene where Michael is communing with a rat - his gateway pet - but it’s not long before he’s demanding a llama, (I mean, sure, they can work in a domestic setting) and a giraffe (someone tell him no) and finally we see him welcome Bubbles the chimp in a nappy. I remember seeing Bubbles in the tabloid stories of the 80s and not really thinking anything more than, ‘that’s a bit weird.’ Wealthy stars in the US did seem to have a thing for wild animals - Siegfried and Roy had a selection of big cats prowling their house, as did Mike Tyson; Nicholas Cage had a pet octopus to help with his acting (ikr). But as I stared at (thankfully AI generated) Bubbles in the movie, I suddenly felt uneasy about him. The song ‘I’m forever blowing bubbles’ started playing in my mind and, for the first time, I wondered if Bubbles had been brought into MJ’s home for even fucking weirder and more niche reasons.

As soon as I got out of the cinema, I googled ‘Was Bubbles abused?” If you do the same, you may read about what renowned ape expert, Jane Goodall had to say about the matter and it will make you feel super sad for Bubbles, who is still alive at 42 and living in a Center for Great Apes in Florida, hurling faeces at trees, which is what they do when they’ve had to listen to Thriller that many times.

So the film does definitely present the man as decidedly outside the parameters of normality. But it also presents him as a man on a mission to bring his light to the world, and to hospital wards in particular - as if this will genuinely help the treatment of sick kids. And at this point, I’m just wondering how you stop this from happening? How do you stop weird blokes hanging with vulnerable children?

None of the admittedly great scenes full of the amazing music for which Michael Jackson is rightly accredited would drown out my anxieties. So that was how I left the cinema. Upset for Bubbles and worried about how wealthy men will create access to children and nobody will stop them.

I really, really hope the next installment doesn’t get made. I don’t think I can cope with much more gaslighting.

EYC Member of the Week

Every year I watch the highlights of the London Marathon and wonder what it would be like to have a go. This year my friend and BBC colleague Emily ran it ahead of her 50th birthday later this month. She trained religiously, documented her practice runs and shared photos of herself looking sweaty but smiling. She is my (s)hero and my Executive Youth Club Member of the Week! (To save her blushes, I’m not posting a pic of her here, but she has my undying admiration.)

For those of us who need four wheels to move 26 miles, I’m throwing these wonderful outtakes from Peter Kay’s Car Share into this week’s Jumble Box… Enjoy!

Stay mobile!

Sam xx