Jinkx Monsoon Takes Us Behind The Scenes Of Her Oh, Mary! Debut

It’s the morning after her debut in Broadway’s Oh, Mary!, and Jinkx Monsoon is at a loss for words. “I like to say ‘bull’s-eye’ rather than perfect, because with bull’s-eye, there’s room for a margin of error, but last night was pretty damn perfect,” she tells Bustle. “It was just one of those magical things that you dream about when you’re a kid, and someone or something convinces you it’s not going to be possible. And when you give up on a dream and then find it realized — I don’t know how to describe it.”

For the next eight weeks, Monsoon, 37, is starring as Mary Todd Lincoln in Cole Escola’s unhinged, ahistorical farce, which reimagines the wife of Abraham Lincoln as a stifled ex-cabaret star with a drinking problem. The show debuted off-Broadway in early 2024 before transferring to the Lyceum Theatre, where Tituss Burgess and Betty Gilpin have also stepped into the titular role.

Monsoon, who rose to fame as a two-time winner of RuPaul's Drag Race, is the first trans woman to star in the show and is joined by Kumail Nanjiani as “Mary’s husband” and Michael Urie as “Mary’s teacher.” Monsoon has a history with them: She’s old pals with Urie (“We did some episodes of his Logo TV show Cocktails & Classics together ages ago”), while she and Nanjiani both voiced characters in the animated Adventure Time universe (“I can’t wait for the fan fiction to come out between our characters getting it on”).

“Being part of a cast just feels like being part of the X-Men,” she says. “We all have our special talent. It feels like being a superhero. And when the five of us get into our costumes, we look like the weirdest little team of superheroes. But I love it.”

Monsoon has also been friends with Escola for more than a decade — the two met while performing at an Australian arts festival in 2013. “I’ve seen their genius from the very beginning,” she says. “And then that person invites you into that experience? Cole doesn’t have to share this. Cole could just stay in the role and lap it up as long as they want. But instead, this is being shared with so many performers who are like me, who dreamed of being a leading lady in a show. The world told them that ain’t going to happen, and now we get to.”

Her voice starts to wobble with emotion. “It’s the silliest, craziest show, but at the end of the day, I’m wearing a giant hoop skirt on Broadway like Bette Davis in All About Eve. Do you know how long I’ve dreamed of that?!”

Monsoon, whose recent theater credits include Broadway’s long-running Chicago and an off-Broadway production of Little Shop of Horrors, had about a week between finishing her run in Pirates! The Penzance Musical and making her Oh, Mary! debut — which meant rehearsing for her new job while finishing up her old one.

“I couldn’t go full throttle every run in our rehearsals because I had a show that night, and everyone was very understanding,” she says. “I don’t feel like I held back from any of my Pirates performances in the end, but I reached a new level of exhaustion that I didn’t think possible. Traveling on tour and getting three hours of sleep on an airplane is pretty exhausting, but fighting off a band of pirates and then getting into a hoop skirt and boxing with Abraham Lincoln, and back again — it’s not only a physical endurance, it is a mindf*ck. But I kept joking that at least they’re in very similar time periods, and I’m wearing bloomers in both, so I’ve got that to lean on.”

In another sense, Monsoon has been preparing for such a role for years. “It reminds me of what I learned in my classical clown class in college, based off the commedia dell’arte clown form,” she says of stepping into Mary Todd Lincoln drag. “We were told there’s two approaches to getting into character. One is you start from the inside out, and you find how you relate to the character, you find the character’s story, and you let that inform the way the character moves and looks and dresses. The other way is to just get into the form of the character and feel how that influences your internal monologue.”

Mary Todd Lincoln falls into the latter: “It’s a cage, right? [The outfit] keeps her immobilized to an extent. It was by design to keep women over-encumbered,” she says. “These things inform your character so much. So I love period costumery. It’s a gift that you’re not often given in theater.”

If stepping into Mary Todd’s shoes might be intimidating to some actors following Escola’s Tony-winning performance, Monsoon isn’t sweating it. She’s finding her take on the absurd-is-an-understatement role by taking its story seriously.

“The best way to play the humorous material is to play the truth of what’s there, and the more you sink into your character’s truths, the more the audience can believe that character believes what they’re saying — no matter how ridiculous it is. That’s where the laughter comes from,” she says. “Every character is fully fleshed out, fully three-dimensional. If any of the characters were just there to be like ‘Derp, derp, derp,’ it wouldn’t be the special thing that we’re all resonating with.”

Does she have a sense of what she’s brought to — and out of — Mary Todd Lincoln compared to other actors’ versions? “Well, I’ll be honest, I haven’t seen my performance, so it’s hard to know,” she jokes.

“What I’ve been working at really hard in the last few years is just being very, very honest and going out on stage and trusting everyone around me and trusting my scene partners and trusting that the audience is there on my side — because if they bought tickets to this, they’re probably on the right side of things. Or they’re about to be shell-shocked, in which case, I can’t wait.”

She takes a breath. “I don’t know. I’ve lived a whole life. I myself have been married, and we’re legally separated. I know what it’s like to work at a relationship, so I bring a lot into Mary. Mary and I are the same person in different timelines, you know?” Monsoon starts to laugh. “But I ain’t never killed nobody, OK? Don’t put that on me!”