oh mary!

This was such a hoot!!!

I’m surprised I cried? But that’s what good comedy does, doesn’t it? It didn’t take me long to become fully on Mary’s side despite her being the most hideous ratty little woman. She was devious. She was preposterous. She was vile. She was hilarious. But we all were on board with her as audience members, because she wanted a life bigger than she was allowed.

The ‘great day’ monologue was beautiful:

Have you ever had a great day? The kind of day so great it imbues every single sad or boring or terrible day that came before it with deep meaning because from where you stand on this great day, all those days were secretly leading to this one?

It was a perfect little play. Packed a punch into effectively 90mins no interval. The set was almost cartoonish. It had a feeling of a comic strip. Like, these little vignettes and jokes and hi-jinks, all separately presented. The black-outs felt very definitive, like the black outline of a comic strip. We even had the line: “you sound like a horny snake from a newspaper cartoon” or whatever it was, which led me to thinking about the show this way.

I also loved how, eventually, the play outgrew the original set. Part of me wondered if we were going to stay there forever, but then it became clearer and clearer that we were leading up to the theatre where Lincoln was supposed to get assassinated.

I think this has had such success because it is brilliant, but also it is the logical next step past Hamilton? Like, in terms of queering history? Hamilton presented a person in history who was relatively forgotten, but also took a very famous history — the American War of Independence — and rewrote it by casting non-white people in each role. Therefore taking a piece of American history and rewriting it for the America that exists today. Same goes for Oh Mary!, it’s taken a very famous history and rewritten it as a queer comedy.

I was talking to playwright Martin O’Connor yesterday and he mentioned this hunt for “the great Scottish musical,” like we’re waiting for our Hamilton moment. It makes me think about why Hamilton and Oh Mary! work. America is at a point where it’s reckoning with itself. There’s discrepancies between the story of the country and its reality. And pieces of theatre which take American history and spin it this way feel like certain people inserting themselves into the country’s history— testing the boundaries, pushing it into new shapes, asking “do I belong here? Can I fit in here? What if we change the shape of this so I can fit in here?”

I can’t anticipate what Scotland needs but there’s always the ever-present question of “what does it mean to be Scottish?” But can we ask the questions beyond that? What is a well-known story or heart of Scotland that can be stretched and explored? I know that there’s Wallace, the William Wallace hip-hop musical. Is that too similar to Hamilton though, I wonder? It sounds like it in theory.