“Jessica Harper’s voice just resonates with me. What’s great with both her characters [in the 1981 film Shock Treatment and 1974’s Phantom of the Paradise] is that she’s being seduced by the life of a performer. ‘Old Souls’ in Phantom reminds me of the moment between Mary’s teacher and Mary when they’re having a very intimate conversation about past lives and reincarnation – which is such a weird conversation to be having in a play that is set in the 1860s. And then (Harper’s) songs in Shock Treatment, she’s grappling with the potential end of her marriage while also being tempted into the life of being a starlet. She sings about feeling like a cat in heat and feeling ready to love herself. And Mary’s horny. She doesn’t even know what all the feelings are, because she’s very sexually repressed, but she is horny, and she doesn’t even know the word horny. She just knows that something’s going on down there that needs tending. There’s a (Shock Treatment) song called ‘Me of Me’ that is just (Harper) singing about how wonderful she is and how ready she is to be a goddess.”

“(‘Is That All There Is?’) is a song I resonate with because I don’t think that song is about giving up. Yeah, it sounds a little bit like apathy, but that’s not what it is. To me, it’s realizing that all the things were promised in life that are going to be ‘the thing that changes everything,’ guess what? It’s just another experience. I’ve been there. I was told, ‘If this ever happens, your life is going to change forever.’ And guess what? It happened, and I’m still here, just still muddling through the way I always have been. And you can look at it the way of, ‘So why give a sh-t?’ Or you can look at it like, ‘Isn’t life so beautiful that we just get to have experience after experience until the end?’ And then the idea of saying to God at the end of your life, ‘Is that all you got?’ That’s just a diva move.

“Also, Mary has something that I really resonate with — and probably my biggest connection to the character — is she’s so bored. She doesn’t want to be an alcoholic. She wants to be on stage. That’s the only thing that can hold her attention. And I’m not saying I’m that level of bored, but I have an addictive personality. That’s something I’ve dealt with in my life, I’ve been very candid about that, so I relate to Mary in that. I have also found the best place to put that (energy) is into my work — I found a way to really dig into my work, and that work has purpose. I don’t feel like I don’t feel like your average workaholic, I feel like someone who gets a lot out of work. I really just love the idea that Mary knows what she wants in life, and she’s sick of not getting it.”

“’I’ve Written a Letter to Daddy’ is like a vaudeville performer past her prime, drunk off her ass, reliving her glory days that weren’t even that glorious. You know, that’s full Mary. That’s not how I feel about Mary, but that’s a label that gets put on Mary. So in that way, Mary has a lot in common with Baby Jane [Davis’ character in 1962’s Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?]. That was a no brainer.”

“Helen Kane, her records are some of the most well-known of the vaudeville era records to survive time. Her music gets referenced constantly. Cyndi Lauper was doing Helen Kane covers in the ‘80s. I know the time period isn’t quite right, but my dramaturgy is that these are the women that Mary would be aspiring to be: these Jezebel nightclub harlots, that’s what she wants to be. She’s romanticized it. And I get it, girl. There was a time when I was working in all the dive bars, and I felt like a f–king queen of the underworld, and that’s hot.”

“Okay, so now this is confession time. I have and am learning to live with my extreme ADHD. Well, I shouldn’t say extreme, but I have it enough that it cannot be ignored. I don’t need to quantify it. But the point is, I have to do a lot of things to keep my attention where I want it throughout the day. So with each character that I play, I like to completely clear my mind of my own life stuff, make sure that people know if it’s an hour before showtime, I’m not responding, I’m not looking at my phone. I clear my mind, and then when I’m on stage, I’m just present with that character. Now that doesn’t mean I’m method acting, because I think method acting is just an excuse for straight men to treat everyone like sh-t.

“Anyway, I am watching everything that’s happening on stage, and that’s the only thing I care about, and I’m trying my best to keep myself in Mary’s thoughts. Any time I have time for my mind to wander, I make sure it’s wandering about the character, and I wander a lot thinking about Mary’s mom, because she continually refers to this portrait of George Washington as her mother. That’s a comment on Mary’s quirks, but also, obviously she had a good relationship with her mother and George Washington looks like her or is invoking memories of her mother. That’s how I make it make sense for me and for Mary. So ‘Mer Girl’ is all about Mary, in my mind, running away from everything that’s holding her down into the cemetery to her mother’s grave to hide out and escape. Mary is continually looking for escape. She doesn’t care how she gets out of here: she’s just got to get the hell out of here. And that song is all about, ‘what would happen if you just left everything and ran into the woods and just addressed something you’ve been avoiding?’”

“That’s just something I like to play. When it comes on at five minutes (to showtime), it’s perfect because we all get out there and the play moves so fast. There are times where you just have to trust your body to know what it’s doing. And I, of course, lean into a lot of physical comedy, and though I am a human, the Muppets inspire my physical comedy all the time. The opening theme, it’s a very vaudeville kind of song. As you know, the 1860s would predate vaudeville, so this would be like cabaret becoming the early stages of vaudeville. I have a lot of vaudeville and vaudeville-era songs on (this playlist), because there’s not a lot of songs from the 1860s on record, and the songs that were popular at the time are all Appalachian folk songs. I have some of those on the playlist, but they’re not as fun to do my makeup to [laughs]. But I have some Ella Fitzgerald versions of those Appalachian folk songs on there.”

“Rock cabaret, that’s where my interest lives musically. I love that song. It’s just such a gorgeous song, and it has such erratic changes in it. The level of emotions that Mary feels, it’s not an acoustic guitar, it’s a 40-piece orchestra. Any song that encapsulates that with poignant lyrics to boot, that’s a Mary song. And the thing I love about that song, ‘Will,’ is that it’s the thrill of falling in love, but there’s this danger and mystery to it.”

“Laufey, she’s just, I’m f–king I’m obsessed. She’s amazing, and her music speaks to me in a big way. And she writes about love and melancholia in a really melodic way. She performs the music beautifully. (‘Silver Lining’ is) another song indulging in the dangerous romance. And I like to think that Mary is very self-aware. She’s extremely self-aware. She says everything that’s wrong with her. You ask her what’s wrong with her and she tells you. That’s the biggest difference between her and another self-aware person is most self-aware people hide those things because they’re so self-aware of it, right? Mary is self-aware and leads with it.”

“My two favorite songs by Chappell Roan from that album are ‘Picture You’ and ‘Coffee.’ What I like to play with is that Mary is still struggling. Well, I don’t want to give too much away, but it’s about a tumultuous marriage. That doesn’t mean she doesn’t still love her husband. The stakes are so much higher if she still has love for him. ‘Picture You’ is more about her affair, whereas ‘Coffee’ is more about her current marriage. Or maybe it’s the other way around. But the point is, she’s falling in love while she’s also handling the potential end of something, and she doesn’t want that thing to end. And that’s such a complex thing that so many people have written songs about: knowing that the relationship is over or needs to be over, but you just can’t control yourself around this person.”

“(The 1976 film Bugsy Malone) is a kid’s movie, but the songs are universal, and they’re brilliantly written and performed. Lots of the songs are about unfulfilled dreams. There’s ‘Tomorrow,’ which is a song about a dancer who’s being overlooked continually. And then there’s ‘I’m Feeling Fine,’ which is the woman singing about a new romance and how strange and new and exciting it is for her. And then there’s ‘Fat Sam’s Grand Slam,’ which is just one of my favorite songs of my life. I just love that song. It’s one of those songs like (Harry Belafonte’s) ‘Jump In the Line.’ If I’m in a bad mood, and you put that song on, it doesn’t matter how bad of a mood I am in, now I’m dancing and singing along. So that, to me, is like the saloon; that’s Mary’s happy place.”

“I want to give a shoutout Ute Lemper, because I have loved lots of her songs. There is an album of Ute Lemper called Berlin Cabaret Songs sung in English, and then there’s a companion album, I don’t know which came out first, but it’s the exact same album sung in German. These songs are from the turn-of-the-century, early 1900s up to the Berlin cabaret Weimar Republic era of Berlin. These songs are so prescient and poignant for today. Some of them have dated language, as you can expect, but for the most part, you would not believe how current the songs sound, even though they were written 100 years ago. That’s like a treasure trove of musical dramaturgy for anybody who loves the Weimar Republic era of cabaret as much as I do.”

“I’m just in love with ‘Portuguese Dance I & II’ from the Poor Things soundtrack. I had completely missed Poor Things: I didn’t see it, I didn’t hear any of the discourse on it when it was all happening. And now, years later, I happen to watch it right before I go into Oh, Mary! I’m like, ‘Hey, that seems a little bit like what Mary’s going through.’ I like to think that Mary is extremely educated and well brought up, but only to be a wife. She has no other skills, and that’s not her fault. That’s just what happened to her. So the only skill set that she has that’s her own — that wasn’t hammered into her — is her singing and her cabaret. That stuff comes natural to her. And in that way, I like to say she’s kind of like Bella Baxter: adult body, baby brain.”

“The last song I want to mention is ‘Be Prepared’ from The Lion King, because there are a handful of villain songs to help me get into some of the meaner aspects of Mary. That can be very indulgent for an actress — I was given the note, ‘you can be more of a c-nt.’ So I do like to occasionally listen to songs like ‘Be Prepared,’ which is all about a coup (cackles).”