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Hello, hello. I'm Brittany Loose, and you're listening to It's Been a Minute from NPR.

A show about what's going on in culture and why it doesn't happen by accident. In this show you have an amazing wig. It's a center part.

Kind of slipped down. But half up in the back, it's half up down down.

Oh yeah, there's a big bun on top of the head.

Right. And then just barrel curls everywhere,

kind of shoulder length deeper.

A ring of the stupidest, bratiest barrel curls

that you can imagine.

It's sort of like a visual snake rattle. There's a sort of

angry petulance to the way the curls move. That is Cole Escola,

star and creator of Oh Mary, an upcoming Broadway play about the first lady,

Mary Todd Lincoln, wife of President Abraham Lincoln.

But in this play, Mary is reimagined as a raging alcoholic with cabaret dreams, and Lincoln is an evil closeted

gay man.

Yeah, the New York Times called it gleefully tasteless, and I call it one of the funniest theater shows I've ever

seen because when I saw O Mary and it's pre-Broadway run I could not stop laughing.

O Mary is full of downright silly humor from beginning to end.

Like there's this amazing bit where Lincoln keeps talking about the Civil War and

trouble in the South and Mary keeps asking the South of where and the jokes per minute ratio in this show is so high.

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