Alaska Never Had a Dream Role — Until 'Oh, Mary!' Made Her Mary Todd Lincoln

Alaska Thunderf*ck has been asked the dream-role question plenty of times and never really had an answer. She has one now, and it comes with a hoop skirt and a husband the play writes as deeply closeted.

The RuPaul's Drag Race All Stars season two champion will open the first national tour of Oh, Mary! in the title role, People reported in announcing the casting Thursday. She shares the billing with Tony winner J. Harrison Ghee, who starts the tour playing Mary's Husband — the show's name for Abraham Lincoln — and then takes over as Mary in January, becoming the first performer to hold both roles in the production.

Her statement about it is the most Alaska thing imaginable, at least in the long version SFist ran — the passage below is one People and Attitude both cut. “As an 8-foot-tall drag queen from outer space, I never really had an answer,” she said. “Mama Rose? I'm too tall. Evita? I'm too short. Willy Loman? Wait… that might actually be amazing.” Nothing stuck until she saw Cole Escola's play, which she called “the greatest play of the generation.” Getting cast in it, she said, is “an actual dream come true.”

Where the tour goes, and who's Mary when it gets there

The run opens September 19 at The Bushnell in Hartford, Connecticut, and Willamette Week counts 17 cities before it finishes. Alaska carries the title role through January 17, 2027, closing that stretch at the Ordway Center in St. Paul. Ghee steps into it two days later at Chicago's CIBC Theatre and holds it through the tour's final performance on May 16, 2027, at West Palm Beach's Kravis Center.

That split matters if you're buying tickets in a city we cover. Willamette Week reports that Alaska has the lead for the Seattle dates and for all three California stops — San Diego, San Francisco and Los Angeles. SFist puts the San Francisco run at the Curran from October 13 to November 1 and the Seattle dates at November 3–8; Willamette Week names the Seattle house as the Paramount Theatre, and the Los Angeles Times has the LA run at the Ahmanson Theatre from November 10 through December 6. TheaterMania has the San Diego stop at the Civic Theatre and adds a Las Vegas run at the Smith Center. Chicago and everything after it — Washington, D.C., Detroit, Philadelphia, Charlotte, Cleveland, Tampa, Houston — belongs to Ghee, per SFist.

Vegas got its own line out of her. Per TheaterMania, Alaska said she will be “the first-ever Mary to don the hallowed hoop skirt in Las Vegas,” calling it “an accolade which will surely make it into my obituary.”

If you want to plan around it: Willamette Week has Seattle seats running $91 to $275, and SFist reports the Curran dates are already showing low availability across the run.

Ghee will be the first to play both

Ghee won a 2023 Tony for Some Like It Hot, in the leading-actor-in-a-musical category, and Broadway.com notes they were the first nonbinary performer both nominated and awarded there. Taking Mary's Husband and then Mary makes them the first person to do both in this show.

Ghee's statement, as SFist, Broadway.com and the Los Angeles Times all rendered it: “The opportunity to get a crack at Mary's Husband is beyond a dream come true.” TheaterMania ran the same line naming both parts — “a crack at Mary's Husband and Mary Todd Lincoln.” Either way, Ghee said they love “getting to switch it up and show multiple sides of myself.” On touring with Alaska: “there are bound to be some brilliant moments, and we are going to set the road on fire with this electrifyingly hilarious play.”

What they're getting into

Oh, Mary! is a one-act comedy about a miserable, drunk, cabaret-obsessed Mary Todd Lincoln in the weeks before her husband's assassination, with the president written as deeply closeted. Escola wrote it and originated the role of Mary. The play premiered off-Broadway at the Lucille Lortel in early 2024 before moving to Broadway, per SFist, which notes it has since become a hit in a way non-musical plays rarely manage. The Los Angeles Times reports it has taken $1 million in a single week and broken its own box office record 13 times. It won Escola the 2025 Tony for best actor in a play — Willamette Week calls Escola the first openly nonbinary artist to win it — and won Sam Pinkleton best direction; Attitude notes the play was also a Pulitzer finalist for drama.

The part has since passed through Jinkx Monsoon, Maya Rudolph, Tituss Burgess, Jane Krakowski, Betty Gilpin and — currently, on Broadway — Meg Stalter.

Alaska told the Los Angeles Times that the casting didn't land until she started doing press for it. “It's really happening, it's just the best role, in the best play ever and I'm honored and I'm excited and I'm thrilled and I can't wait,” she said. Elsewhere in the same interview, on the costume: she is “really excited to wear the sacred bratty curls and the hallowed hoop skirt.”

One wrinkle for the Pacific Northwest: the tour skips Oregon entirely, which Willamette Week — published in Escola's home state — took about as well as you'd expect. Seattle is as close as it gets.

Additional casting is still to come. And per People, Alaska worked in one more gag: her fiancé, Matt Herrmann, happens to be “a celebrated Abraham Lincoln impersonator,” which made the casting, in her word, “destiny.”

If you're building a night around it, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago and Las Vegas all have plenty on the map for after the curtain.