Mike and Carlee Productions’ Broadway play ‘Oh, Mary!’ wins for best actor, best director
LINWOOD — When the Tony Awards were announced Sunday evening, June 8, a Linwood native sitting there at the ceremony in Radio City Music Hall jumped out of her seat.
The Broadway play “Oh, Mary!” that Carlee Briglia co-produced with partner Mike Lavoie of Mike and Carlee Productions won two Tony awards.
“For our first Broadway show to have this type of success, and then not only be nominated, but also to win Tony Awards for (actor) Cole Escola and director Sam Pinkleton, is beyond our wildest imaginations of what would have happened with the show when we started doing it,” said Briglia, a 2006 Mainland Regional High School graduate.
Escola, who is nonbinary and wrote the play, won Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role in a Play. Pinkleton won Best Direction of a Play.
The awards weren’t the goal, Briglia said last week. “It has been such a gratifying experience just to have people continue to come to the show and love it.”
Lavoie and Briglia never envisioned this turn of events.
They produce shows that are almost exclusively downtown and this was the first one they transferred to Broadway as the lead producers.
“Oh, Mary!” is a dark comedy about Mary Todd Lincoln. It was cited by The New York Times as “one of the best comedies in years.”
Asked about the atmosphere inside Radio City Music Hall in New York City, Briglia admitted she couldn’t say because when the director won that first award for the play, she said, “I just remember leaping to my feet and screaming at the top of my lungs. I was so happy with him. I don’t know what else was going on in the room. And then just watching him on stage and being so happy for him and crying at his beautiful speech, and then it just felt like Cole’s award came so fast after it.”
She said it was a surreal feeling for the entire cast and creative team who were all in the audience.
Her parents, Philip and Virginia Briglia of Linwood, also were in the audience at the Tonys along with her younger sister, Coby. She said having them there was really special. (She also has an older sister, Corissa, a mother of three.) Briglia noted her parents have been able to see a bunch of the shows she has produced over the years.
Mike and Carlee
Productions
Briglia was a standout soccer and basketball player at Mainland Regional. She scored more than a 1,000 points in her career on the hardcourt and then played soccer for Georgetown University, where she had a screenwriting professor in common with Lavoie, who had graduated a number of years before her.
Lavoie was working for Mike Birbiglia on the comedian’s second Off-Broadway show, “My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend” at the Barrow Theater, and they were looking for interns. The connection through the professor led to Briglia being hired as an intern. Soon after she was hired full time as part of Birbiglia’s company.
They toured the show around the country and she and Lavoie became friends.
“We sort of both went off into different things and we would come together to produce these shows every once in a while. And at some point when we had done it enough and we kind of figured it out,” she said, “we knew that what we were doing was enough to feel like it was something repeatable.”
They formed Mike and Carlee Productions and have worked on multiple shows over more than a decade.
They have worked with a who’s who of actors and comedians in film and theater including, to name some, Colin Quinn, Lakeith Stanfield, Azealia Banks, Common, Patricia Arquette, Rainn Wilson, Ramy Youssef, Ilana Glazer and Hannah Gadsby.
Briglia said she loves working with talented, creative people, spending a day “going into dark rooms, like theaters, and sort of figuring out how to make a show.”
“The guiding thing when we’re choosing a show is we just want to be the people who help make that person’s vision happen. And so if someone comes to us with a show and it really resonates with us, we just want to give that person the tools, the collaborators, the budget, whatever they need to make the show work to either a bigger audience or a different type of audience than they’ve had before,” she explained.
“It really comes from a place of admiration of all the people that we’ve gotten to work with. And we feel really lucky that these people who have … really illustrious careers feel like they trust us to produce their work Off Broadway.”
Briglia majored in American studies at Georgetown, an interdisciplinary major, and took a lot of screenwriting classes.
“I just knew I wanted to work in the arts and I thought that I wanted to be a screenwriter. And when I met Mike Lavoie working for Mike Birbiglia, I also found a group of people — actors, directors, writers. … I kind of found this community of creative people,” she said.
The company website said it specializes in producing commercial Off Broadway productions “and have had long-running and award-winning shows which have transferred to Broadway and live on as specials for Netflix, HBO and other networks.”
Briglia’s credits over the years, in addition to producer, include writer, director, production supervisor, production manager, writer’s assistant, line producer, tour producer and producer’s assistant.
Over time, a few things clicked for her.
“I think when I started producing these theater shows specifically, it really felt like a way that I could use the part of my brain that was really good at logistics and numbers and just basically taking a big problem — which is how do we do this thing? — and breaking it down into its smaller parts.”
It also ignites the creative side of her brain that loves making new work. That is why when no one was doing live theater during the COVID-19 pandemic, she realized how much she missed that job.
That propelled the team post-pandemic to “do our best to just create the work that we’re really proud of, and that we think audiences really want to see, because it does feel like in this specific time there is a real desire to see comedy and a real market to see comedy. And especially comedy that’s meaningful to people in some way.”
So what does producing a Tony Award-winning play mean for Mike and Carlee Productions?
“It sort of opens us up to all different types of shows,” Briglia said. “We’ve produced comedies. A lot of them have been one-person comedies. (“Oh, Mary!”) is a play with five people. We’ve met a lot of different people during this process (since the Tony nominations) that either have interesting ideas for shows or can help us create shows down the line,” she said.
“It’s funny because part of it is we’re just doing the same thing we’ve always done, which is producing shows, mostly Off Broadway, that we like and that we think are funny and that we think audiences will like. But in another way, we’ve sort of been opened up to just a whole new world within the theater community of people who sort of know a little bit more what we do and are interested in working with us.”
The role of a producer
Briglia explained a producer can be a lot of things, but at its base level “you’re responsible for sort of guiding the whole show from the very beginning to what it ends up being. We’re involved in every aspect of the show from hiring the creative team members, the general managers who work on the show and deal with the day-to-day, the marketing, the press team. It’s a lot about just making sure all the pieces are in place for the show to happen in the first place.”
That extends to guiding the show through its run, deciding how long it’s going to run, whether it can be extended, going through recasting and a major element — raising the money from investors and co-producers.
That last aspect is “a big part of the job. I mean, depending on how much money you have to raise and especially on Broadway, the scale of those shows. And then because obviously if you can’t raise the money, then the show can’t exist.”
The Mike and Carlee team has recast the role of Mary in “Oh, Mary!” twice already. Escola concludes their run in the show June 21. The production is on Broadway at the Lyceum Theatre through Sept. 28. (Tickets at telecharge.com/Oh-Mary-Tickets.)
Producing joy
As a producer, Briglia said she loves putting together a team for a project, whether a small team for a small show or a fairly large team for a production such as “Oh, Mary!” that moves to Broadway.
“There’s this very specific alchemy that comes from putting a bunch of creative people in a room to try and make a show. And when it works, it’s just such a joyful thing, because not only do you create a thing you love, but then you get to share that with audiences who come seven or eight times a week to see the show,” she said.
“And in the case of comedy, they’re leaving happier. They’re leaving more joyful, and it’s just a really gratifying thing. I think it’s about the people who are on stage, but it’s also about all the people who work around the show and that is the part that I like the most.”
Learn more at mikeandcarlee.com.
– By DAVID NAHAN/Sentinel staff