There really is something about Mary. I’m talking, of course, about Mary Todd Lincoln of Cole Escola’s runway camp hit, “Oh, Mary!,” which opened Thursday at the Ahmanson Theatre.
Escola, who won a Tony Award for playing Mary, has created a role that has become a holy grail for the most fearless and demented of naughty clowns. Bowen Yang is currently starring in the play on Broadway, and Betty Gilpin, Maya Rudolph and Tituss Burgess are among the luminaries who have staggered to great acclaim in the character’s high heels.
In the show’s Los Angeles premiere, singer, actor, drag star and winner of “RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars 2,” Alaska Thunderf— commandeers this camp ship with the authority of pirate armed with an AK-47. She’s undeterrable — and exactly what the production needs to live up to its frenzied hype in a venue as large as the Ahmanson.
But just who is this Mary Todd Lincoln sprung from Escola’s feverish imagination? Well, she’s a frustrated first lady and a desperate lush, married to a man who is busy fighting two Civil Wars, one against the South and the other against his homosexual urges. (And like the South, those urges keep threatening to rise again.)
By her account she’s “a rather well-known niche cabaret legend,” whose career was “cut short by a love affair gone horribly right.” Mary’s Husband (delectably played by John-Andrew Morrison) has another take on Mary’s aborted stint in showbiz. But his main concern is making sure that she doesn’t get her hands on any more booze and embarrass him when his political fate is hanging by a thread.
The South wants him out and the North isn’t much happier. The stress is maddening, and his young male assistant (Michael Lepore) is so eager to please that the President can barely control himself.
A chaperone (Pooya Mohseni) has been engaged to keep Mary in line, but an exorcist would be more in order. This goody two-shoes, with an erotic fetish for ice cream that she mistakenly shares, is defenseless against Mary’s unbridled assault.
Standing tall in a mourning hoop gown and Shirley Temple curls, Alaska’s Mary is like a cross between “The Bad Seed” and “Mommie Dearest.” Joan Crawford herself would back down in a standoff.
Her savagery knows no check. Bored, she amuses herself by throwing her chaperon down a flight of stairs, setting fire to her house and spilling the poor woman’s dirty secret, which she has pried out of her as though it were another bottle of booze locked in her husband’s desk drawer.
An acting teacher (Wesley Taylor) has been brought in to keep Mary from basically destroying the White House. But her talent for reciting Shakespeare is even less obvious than her self-proclaimed gift for cabaret medleys.
What a polymorphously perverse web Escola weaves! Everywhere you look, there are furtive sexual shenanigans afoot. Does Mary want to run off with her acting teacher? Does her chaperone have designs on Mary’s Husband? Does Mary‘s Husband really want to kill off his gay compulsions?
The production, directed by Tony winner Sam Pinkleton, treats the play like a Victorian toy melodrama. Blackouts and clanging piano music italicize the sardonic tension.
The scenic design by dots and the costumes by Holly Pierson create a dollhouse world of inverted morality. Pinkleton ensures that the arch aesthetic of the mise en scène is rigorously observed in the playing.
The cast is terrific across the board, with Alaska and Morrison valiantly leading the madcap charge. Morrison’s lusty humor brings the Oval Office temptations of his character fiendishly to life. His aide’s obedient presence is like a casserole that has been especially prepared to derail Mary’s Husband from his abstemious diet.
Alaska struggles to make one bit of physical comedy work. (She may be too tall for the seduction scene with her teacher in which she has to somehow gracefully slide off her husband’s desk.) But I loved the malicious spin she inflects on her lines, the voice of a cat fiddling with its prey before sinking in its murderous claws.
I can’t pretend that “Oh, Mary!”is my idea of comic heaven. I grew up watching brilliant drag acts during my days in the New York clubs in the 1980s and early ’90s, and my theatrical sensibility was shaped by the peerless camp parodies of the Ridiculous Theatrical Company.
In becoming more mainstream, drag has lost some of its dangerousness. “Oh, Mary!” owes as much to “The Carol Burnett Show” as it does to a queer tradition of underground performance. Had Alaska stormed out wearing curtains with the rod still attached, à la Burnett in the famous “Gone With the Wind” send-up, I would not have been at all surprised, even though I’ve seen the play twice before, both times with Escola.
But “Oh, Mary!” is a welcome diversion — a revisionist lark with an irreverent LGBTQ+ spirit. The success of the production hinges in large part on its impressive tonal execution. Pinkleton’s production hits every mark of Escola’s alt-comedy.
Audiences are clearly eager to buy what “Oh, Mary!” is selling — athletically performed cheeky fun. Maybe the third time for me was the charm. Instead of longing for more depth, I let the mildly subversive high jinks carry me away on a much-needed holiday from reality.
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