History has a funny way of burying its most chaotic spirits under layers of starched cotton, heavy wool, and solemn marble busts. We prefer our historical figures flat. We like our presidents noble, unblinking, and perpetually gazing into a copper penny. We like their spouses pious, quiet, and neatly tucked away into the margins of an 1860s parlor.
Then along comes a play like Oh, Mary!, Cole Escola's delirious, pitch-black historical farce that treats the weeks leading up to Abraham Lincoln's assassination like an episode of a deranged soap opera. Meanwhile, you can read similar events here: The Structural Failure of Intellectual Property Translation in Major Studio Adaptations.
Enter Alaska Thunderfuck.
The RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars winner does not merely step into a costume. She steps into a legacy of institutional absurdity. When Alaska takes the stage as Mary Todd Lincoln at the Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles—running from November 10 to December 6, 2026, as part of the venue's Center Theatre Group season—she is bringing an eight-foot-tall presence from the outer reaches of theatrical camp into the hallowed halls of traditional subscription theater. To understand the bigger picture, we recommend the excellent report by IGN.
To understand why this casting choice is an absolute masterstroke, you have to look past the marquee lights. You have to look at the geometry of performance.
Drag is exaggeration made flesh. It takes the invisible cage of societal expectations and paints it in neon, glitter, and greasepaint. Mary Todd Lincoln, as written by Escola and embodied by cultural disruptors, was a woman suffocated by the heavy drapery of the White House, drowning her unrequited ambitions and stifled desires in alcohol, screaming into the void of a nation tearing itself apart at the seams. She was trapped in a role she never auditioned for.
Drag queens know a thing or two about being trapped in restrictive costumes.
When Alaska remarks that she never had a dream role because she was too tall for Mama Rose and too short for Evita, she touches on a profound truth about typecasting. Society loves to put people into tidy boxes. History does the same thing with women who dared to feel too much or scream too loud. By casting a towering drag superstar as the most notoriously misunderstood First Lady in the American pantheon, the production shatters the glass case of the museum exhibit and sets the historical record on fire.
The mechanics of this staging are deceptively tight. Directed by Tony Award winner Sam Pinkleton, the production runs a breathless eighty minutes without an intermission. There is no room to catch your breath. There is no polite pause to check your watch. It is an unyielding sprint through alcoholism, suppressed yearnings, and marital discord that plays out under the shadow of Ford's Theatre.
Opposite Alaska in the national tour stands Tony Award winner J. Harrison Ghee, anchoring the chaos as Mary's beleaguered husband. The dynamic between Alaska's sharp-edged, celestial camp and Ghee’s magnetic stage presence creates a friction that turns historical reverence into a live wire. (It is worth noting, with a grin that matches the production's tone, that Alaska’s real-life fiancé is a celebrated Abraham Lincoln impersonator. Life, it turns out, insists on writing better fanfiction than any playwright could dream up.)
When tickets for the Los Angeles engagement at the Ahmanson Theatre go on sale, audiences are not paying to see a standard biographical reenactment. They are paying to witness a demolition. They are lining up to watch the polite boundaries of institutional theater get stretched, squeezed, and completely rewritten by artists who understand that the past is a foreign country, and the best way to visit is to smash the windows.
Consider what happens when the curtain goes up in downtown Los Angeles this November. The lights will hit the proscenium. The crowd will lean in, expecting a quaint period piece about the Civil War era. Instead, they will get a fierce, alcoholic, glittering phantom of grief and ambition shouting back at the history books.
Mary Todd Lincoln wanted to be remembered. She wanted her inner life acknowledged. She likely never imagined she would get her wish dressed in high drag, voiced by a queen who treats the stage like an interstellar runway.
History didn't know what hit it.
