Oh, Mary! achieves the kind of rarified hilarity that makes you laugh in anticipation of laughing. The play, written and originally performed by the Northwest-bred Cole Escola and directed by Sam Pinkleton, began its five-day run last night at The Paramount Theatre with a sold-out performance during which the audience was putty in the hands of its gung-ho cast; it was not hard to see why, after its 2024 Broadway premiere, it became an inescapably buzzy hit, inciting pangs of jealousy in those (including this writer) with a geographically and financially difficult time being able to see it.

With two Tony wins and a West End tour preceding it, the show’s lengthy North American run began in September, bringing to several metropolitan cities a cheeky, joke-a-second brand of comedy that treats history with the sort of goofy impoliteness spiritually of a piece with Sharpie-ing a mustache on someone’s upper lip while they’re sleeping. The Mary of the title, you may have already heard, refers to someone kept in the popular imagination’s margins: First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln, who in the play is reimagined as an out-of-control alcoholic with smudgy fire-engine-red lipstick who wants nothing more than to leave behind her wifely duties so that she can pursue a cabaret career. As superbly played in this iteration by drag legend Alaska Thunderf— — predated in the role by tantalizing forebears that include Maya Rudolph, Jinkx Monsoon, Meg Stalter, Jane Krakowski, and scores of other crack comedy performers — this fictionalized Mary is affectionately delusional but has flickers of disarming, even touching self-awareness.

Read the full review at 425.

Header image: John Andrew Morrison and Alaska Thunderfuck in Oh, Mary!. Photo by Evan Zimmerman for MurphyMade.