OKAY, MARY
A rare non-glowing review of Cole Escola’s Oh, Mary! (2025 with Jinkx Monsoon)
Last week,1 I had the honor of seeing Jinkx Monsoon in Oh, Mary! on Broadway. I don’t entirely regret spending more than I have in my life on a single event ticket, but I might not rush back for a different leading lady (though Tituss Burgess would’ve been fun).
To echo what you’ve already heard from everybody: The performances, particularly Monsoon’s, were incredible. We all know from Drag Race that Monsoon’s chops can elevate even the most confounding World of Wonder material to camp greatness.2
While Oh Mary! wasn’t drag-race-acting-challenge bad, it was a tad disappointing given the effusive hype. The humor here is mostly stupid—there’s subtler, wittier dialogue in Shrek 2. Maybe even Shrek 3. At first, I was upset and confused by how little I was laughing, when the rest of the theater seemed to be enjoying the lame jokes immensely. I even ended up forcing some laughs throughout, so as to be the dyke scrooge in the cramped Lyceum.
For instance, everyone else was busting at the seams just from the idea of Gay Abe Lincoln getting called a “F….f…. fag.” Perhaps I’m just too edgy to see the hilarity.
There’s also another scene where Lincoln kicks Mary out of his office because he’s receiving a blowjob under his desk from his attendant; I understood what was happening about two minutes before the Ruveal. Everyone else screamed when Lincoln’s boytoy appeared from under the desk. I thought we’d all already laughed about that one.
It’s not that I mind the script’s anachronism. When Mary refers to herself as a “rather well-known niche cabaret legend,” she calls up a self-conscious Zoomer affect similar to that of Rayne Fisher Quann, self-proclaimed “niche micro-influencer.”
But unlike our reigning internet princess, Mary struggles to maintain a consistent character. By turns, she is intelligent and dry (“What’s in your heart?” someone asks her. She responds sardonically: “Blood? Valves? Pulmonary artery?”); by turns, an illiterate fool (her attempt to spell the words “John Wilkes Booth in Romeo & Juliet” looks roughly like “jon wlkz buth en roe-me-oh and gollyit.” Ha.). Her personality changes depending on what a given bit requires, which is a comedy pet peeve. Camp is a decent, but insufficient, excuse.
To be fair, there is a whisper of a promise of social commentary—something about rich, privileged white Americans burying themselves in substance abuse, solipsism, and frivolous dreams of artistic greatness while our taxes bomb Gaza to rubble.
Her country in ruins, Mary can only feel bored. Begging her new acting coach, John Wilkes Booth, to stay: “I can’t do free time; I’m a drunk.”
As a (recovering?) stoner, I felt that one in my soul. Jinkx Monsoon herself has publicly struggled with alcoholism; her candor on this topic is one of the reasons I’m such a steadfast fan. Her ability to imbue some weird pathos into scenes where Mary drinks paint thinner, vomits it back up, and eats the vomit is just one more thing that makes you wish this script were a tiny bit better.
as I write this, but I’m posting it later
not the best example of my point but I couldn’t resist. It’s like the gay rickroll.