Tony and Obie Award-winning actor, writer and director John Cameron Mitchell will return to Broadway in the hit play Oh, Mary! for a limited 12-week commitment this winter. Best known as the writer and original star of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Mitchell will play “Mary Todd Lincoln” from Tuesday, February 3, 2026 to April 26, 2026.
“Cole Escola and Sam Pinkleton are the wild horses that got me into hanging out and I couldn’t be happier!” Mitchell said. “As the most mature Mary yet, my days are filled working on StairMaster, mastering Ozempic, and mastering my Brilliant Dialogue. ‘Line?!’ Thanks, Cole, may I make you proud to mutilate your classic! »
“Welcoming John to this cast is both delightful and inevitable,” added Tony Award-winning director Sam Pinkleton. “Many of us in the Oh, Mary! universe, including myself, would not be where we are without the work of John, who reshaped what live performance could look like for generations of loving weirdos. He’s a queer trailblazer, a cultural icon, a brilliant actor – and, most importantly for his new role, a giant idiot.”
Mitchell joins an esteemed company of actors who have donned the role’s bratty curls, including original star and Tony Award-winning playwright Cole Escola, as well as current “Mary” Jane Krakowski (until January 4, 2026), Tituss Burgess, Betty Gilpin, Hannah Solow and Jinkx Monsoon, who returns to the series for an encore engagement on January 8, 2026. Solow will play the title role. role on January 6 and 7.
Directed by 2025 Tony Award winner Pinkleton, Oh, Mary! opened on Broadway on July 11, 2024 at the Lyceum Theater, where it became the first show in the theater’s 121-year history to gross more than $1,000,000 in a single week. O Mary! has since broken its own box office record twelve times and become the first show of the 2024-25 Broadway season to recoup its investment.
John Cameron Mitchell grew up throughout the United States and Europe as the son of a United States Army general and a Scottish painter/teacher. He has been directing, writing and performing for stage, film, television and podcasts for over 40 years. He studied acting with Frank Galati at Northwestern University (1981-5) and later co-wrote the musical Hedwig and the Angry Inch which Rolling Stone called “the best rock musical of all time” and for which he won a 1998 Village Voice Obie Award, the 2014 Tony Award for Best Revival of a Musical, and a 2015 Special Tony for his performance. He wrote/directed/starred in the film adaptation which The New York Times called one of the “ten best films of 2001” and for which he won the Best Director and Audience Awards at the 2001 Sundance Film Festival and a 2001 Golden Globe nomination for Best Actor in a Musical or Comedy and 17 other awards.
John wrote and directed the sexually frank 2006 improvisational film, Shortbus, which premiered in the Cannes Official Selection and won several festival awards as well as a Best Ensemble nomination at the Gotham Awards. His 2010 film Rabbit Hole, adapted from the Pulitzer Prize-winning play, earned him an Independent Spirits Best Director nomination and a Best Actress Oscar nomination for Nicole Kidman. He directed and co-wrote the romantic YA punk film How to Talk to Girls at Parties (2017) with Elle Fanning and Nicole Kidman. He produced (with Gus Van Sant) Jonathan Caouette’s Tarnation (2004), which won the National Society of Film Critics’ Best Documentary Award.
John is a founding member of the Drama Department Theater Company for which he adapted and directed Tennessee Williams’ Kingdom of Earth with Cynthia Nixon and Peter Sarsgaard.
Other Broadway acting credits include the original casts of The Secret Garden (Drama Desk name), Six Degrees of Separation and Big River. Off Broadway: The Destiny of Me by Larry Kramer (1993 Obie Award for Best Actor, Drama Desk name) and Lincoln Center’s Hello Again (Drama Desk name). His film acting work includes: Spike Lee’s Girl Six, Michael Mann’s Band of the Hand, Book of Love, Misplaced. TV roles: “Girls”, “The Sandman”, “Shrill”, “The Good Fight”, “Yellowjackets”, “Mozart in the Jungle”, “Vinyl”, “MacGyver”, “Head of the Class”, “The Equalizer”, “The Twilight Zone”, “The Stepford Children”, and as series regular in “Party Girl”, “City on Fire” and as Joe Exotic in “Joe Vs Carole”.
He has written and directed two fictional podcast series: the autobiographical musical Anthem: Homunculus (2019) called a “hallucinatory masterpiece” by Rolling Stone, starring himself, Glenn Close, Cynthia Erivo, Patti LuPone and Laurie Anderson; and Cancellation Island with Holly Hunter. He is a DJ/founder of the long-running Mattachine Dance Party and released the collaborative music albums New American Dream Pts. 1&2, and Turnaround time. He remains active on the concert circuit with The Origin of Love – The Songs and Stories of Hedwig, Cassette Roulette, Blackstar Symphony and Queen Bitch – John Cameron Mitchell Sings Bowie.
John is a former member of the Sundance Institute Filmmaker Labs and has represented the Institute as a screenwriting advisor in Brazil and Peru. He received the 2007 Dorothy Hirshon Award for Achievement in Film from New School University and the 2019 Excellence in Acting Award from the Provincetown Film Festival. For his work on gay/trans rights, he received the 2004 Special Human Rights Award from the New York State Senate Democrats. He is currently working on LSM, his new play about the artist Claude Cahun, and two biopics (about Allen Ginsberg and AIDS activist Peter Staley), and also teaches “Problematic Cinema,” a filmmaking course at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
