Tituss Burgess wants me to headline this interview: “If Cole [Escola] doesn’t win every Tony, it’ll be highway robbery. Whatever you’ve got to do to put that in.”
The actor is deep into preparations for a limited run as the titular Mary Todd Lincoln in the aforementioned playwright’s smash hit Oh, Mary!. “It’s relentless,” Burgess says of rehearsals for the show, which began a week prior to our conversation. The role “looks funny and flighty and easy, but the highs and lows are dramatic, and it’s taking a bit of recalibration.”
Even well into prep for the show, Burgess still expresses surprise when I note that Escola had thrown Burgess’ name around frequently last year as the musical slowly broke the atmosphere and ascended to Broadway. But Burgess was unaware: “Are you serious? Dude, absolutely not! It wasn’t until my manager was like, you should listen to this podcast called Las Culturistas, and this was almost 9-10 months ago! They dropped my name, like they just opened their show on Broadway, and they’re talking about me like… it doesn’t make sense to me! But I was so flattered and honored.”
Burgess’ starring role in Oh, Mary! comes on the heels of his adaptation of The Preacher’s Wife in Atlanta last summer, and his fall London residency, The Indecisive Warrior. As Burgess sees it: “Musicals, at least, you kind of get a break, because there's so many people and there's so much going on, so even if you're the lead, you at the very least have the support of, you know, 30 other people around you doing something so you can at least step off stage and grab a drink of water if you need it.” With Oh, Mary!, there’s “1, 2, 3, 4 people, and everyone is doing their due diligence. It’s a very hard show to do.” Elsewhere in the conversation, Burgess notes again: “Honestly, I’ll tell you what, this is probably the hardest role I’ve ever done.”
Having seen the play off-Broadway for a profile on Escola last year, and then post-transfer, for fun, I note that the show is just about the funniest thing I’ve ever seen. Burgess is no stranger to comedy, having made an uproarious debut in 30 Rock before starring in The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, another Tina Fey project. On the comedic intimacy afforded by a straight-play environment, Burgess says, “Oh, friend, I don't prep my performances to be lured by the audience. I guide them.”
As for the chance to step into the role of Mary Todd Lincoln, a character now enshrined in the Broadway pantheon, I ask Burgess if he paid any mind to audience expectations around the role, and the show itself. “If this were Wicked, 20 plus years later, I wouldn’t have done it, obviously,” Burgess says. “But it’s still fresh, it’s extremely relevant. And the fact that the Lincoln family is entirely Black makes it something completely differential, and especially… well, I don’t want to get into the backdrop of America…” Burgess trails off for a moment. “I feel a different responsibility to the part. While I’m playing a woman, it’s a show about a human being told no, and then taking matters into their own hands. Now, while she takes matters in her own hands to the extreme, the sort of metaphor, what it represents is: You have to tell yourself yes. And for Black men everywhere, we have to tell ourselves yes. And I don’t take that lightly.”
As for expectations around the character, Burgess notes: “I never think about that. My existence is iconic, and I mean that in the most humble way.”
The resume speaks for itself, as the saying goes. Burgess is a seasoned professional, having his first appearance on Broadway in 2005, in Good Vibrations at the Eugene O’Neill Theater. From there, he starred in Jersey Boys, The Little Mermaid, and Guys and Dolls the year it was nominated for Best Revival of a Musical. He’d go on to perform at the Tony Awards that year, in 2009. It would be 14 years before he’d appear on Broadway again, in Moulin Rouge!, a time he has discussed in interviews over the years.
In one such profile, Burgess said he’d “went as far in that industry as I was going to be allowed to go” post-Guys and Dolls. It mirrors his earlier description of Mary Todd Lincoln as a character who is repeatedly told no. “I went as far as the industry thought it could tell me I could go, and I bought it. I bought it,” he says. “I allowed it to extinguish, almost, something that I knew could be far greater than what it was affording me.” He adds that in returning to Broadway, “My body goes, or at least my mind goes, ‘Tituss, there's something else that you are supposed to do. A rebirth, a rejuvenation, a reframing that has to happen for you to enter into this next phase of your life.’ No matter how hard I tried to ignore it or quell it, or push it aside, it comes barreling through.”
On what he’s learned in this new chapter, Burgess says, “You can be ambushed into surrender, or you can just surrender. And surrender is what is dawning upon me, and it is beautiful, and I'm grateful for it. I don't even know what is happening or even what to call what I'm experiencing. People are like, ‘Oh, Tituss, you just got a job. You're doing a play. Big whoop. It's just so much more. I'll never be able to quite frame it for, you know, the world to see. They will just experience it through my art.”
To Burgess, Oh, Mary! “is a huge gift, and it's a bigger gift than I think I'm able to express to people.” As for Escola themself: “Just let them know that they are doing such a monumental thing. And, you know, I don't want to make it seem bigger, because of the backdrop of America right now, but it's big just because they are a supernova. And my love for them and my respect for them… I learned so much from them, and I'm in awe of what they've done, how they've done it.”
The same, I think, will be said of Tituss Burgess, once audiences sit down for his Oh, Mary! debut.
My existence is iconic, and I mean that in the most humble way.
Photography: Emilio Madrid
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