September 26, 2006
The Musical About Mrs. Lincoln Posted by Claire Lui at 05:00 PM EST I am a sucker for all shows entitled “[____]: The Musical!” I have attended Medea: The Musical!, a campy drag-queen version of the Greek tragedy, and Bat Boy: The Musical, a cheerful version of a Weekly World News tabloid story about a half-bat half-boy rendered in song.
It was not until last week, though, when my colleague Andrea and I went to see Asylum! The Musical, that I fully realized the possibilities of the genre. In our July 2006 issue we published an article by Jason Emerson, “The Madness of Mary Lincoln,” about the former First Lady’s years in an insane asylum. I fact-checked the piece, and I was drawn into the world of Lincoln obsession, becoming totally engrossed with the family trials of Mary Todd Lincoln, Robert Todd Lincoln, and the rest of the Todd and Lincoln clans. Jason Emerson had discovered a cache of long-lost letters from Mary Todd Lincoln, and reading the copies of those old documents really drew me into the story.
I am not, however, convinced that a topic that makes for exciting fact-checking makes for exciting musical theater. I never imagined that dry and dusty facts (the early flirtation of Mary Todd and Stephen Douglas or the scheming of Mary Todd Lincoln’s savior, Myra Bradwell) could be set to song, and watching these facts be sung by a cast of five was a probably the strangest history experience I’ve ever had. I was sufficiently mesmerized by the play that when I turned to Andrea to comment that the actor playing Abe Lincoln looked more like the actor John Lithgow than Abe, she started laughing and pointed out he was the same actor who was playing Dr. Richard Patterson, something that had completely escaped my notice.
The musical, which portrays Mary as a loving mother forsaken by her cold and money-hungry son (an image, I think, that hit home with many of the audience members), is only one take on the incident. But no matter how you cut it, the tale of Mary Lincoln in the asylum is essentially a domestic one, and thus a footnote. The story is closer to an episode of Everybody Loves Raymond than anything else. I think this kind of history appeals to women—and I say this as a woman—because it represents a kind of forgotten history, a reflection of daily life that is ignored in the stories of battles and politics that make up most history textbooks. Both the composer-lyricist, Carmel Owen, and the book writer of the play, June Bingham, are women, as is the author of a new novel about Mary Lincoln, Janis Cooke Newman.
Newman’s book, Mary: A Novel, seems in my brief skimming to have taken the novels of Judith Krantz, rather than a family television show, as a model. There are many steamy passages between Mary and Abraham Lincoln in this book, and I realized that there are places where my historical imagination is limited. Despite my fascination with the Lincoln family, I do not know if I am ready to read a bodice-ripping (and let me tell you, there is bodice-ripping) description of Mary and Abraham’s love life.
Both the musical and the book have an admirable goal: to make history relevant, and to point out that the Lincolns are not so different from you and me. I think, though, that sometimes we like our heroes to be heroes, and not quite so much like us.
If you are fascinated with the domestic life of First Ladies, you may be interested in Asylum! which ends October 1 and is playing at the York Theatre here in Manhattan. Mary: A Novel, by Janis Cooke Newman, is published by MacAdam/Cage, and the publicist tells me that the book is going to be reviewed by People magazine. At last, a trashy history book.
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