Before Jane Krakowski takes the stage each night at the Lyceum Theatre, where she’s been playing the titular role in Broadway’s Oh, Mary! since October, she performs a brief pre-show ritual. To get into the headspace of Mary Todd Lincoln—well, Mary Todd Lincoln as delightfully, derangedly conceived by Cole Escola—Krakowski puts on The Ethel Merman Disco Album.
“I always listen to her cover of ‘There’s No Business Like Show Business’ while I finish up and make sure my curls look bratty,” Krakowski says cheekily. “No other song better sums up our show, and it instantly snaps me into Mary Todd’s mindset.”
It tracks that Merman’s vinyl—a sought-after camp artifact—would show up in Krakowski’s Oh, Mary! dressing room (itself designed by Escola’s longtime pal Amy Sedaris alongside Liz Wolff from Cure Thrift). Written by and originally starring Escola, the hit farce, which reimagines Mary Todd as a former “niche cabaret legend” with a penchant for booze and a closeted husband, became a word-of-mouth sensation when it debuted at the 299-seat Lucille Lortel in 2024. Since moving to the Lyceum, Oh, Mary! has developed the sort of cult fandom virtually unheard of for a Broadway show that isn’t about Alexander Hamilton.
“I loved it so much that I was almost mad I didn’t write the part for myself,” Krakowski half-jokes. She’s been a fan of Escola since meeting them on the set of At Home with Amy Sedaris years ago, but seeing an early performance of Oh, Mary! unlocked new levels of appreciation.
“As someone who longs for great comedic writing, this just had it all,” she says. “It felt so special to watch Cole get celebrated for creating something that celebrates all of their talents, but also holds up to so many different interpretations.”
Since Escola’s departure from Oh, Mary! to focus on other projects—including a Miss Piggy movie produced by Jennifer Lawrence and Emma Stone—Betty Gilpin, Tituss Burgess, and Jinkx Monsoon have all slipped into Mary Todd’s bratty curls. (Krakowski saw and loved all of them.) When Escola and director Sam Pinkleton asked Krakowski if she’d be open to taking a turn, she immediately said yes.
“There aren’t many brilliantly written comedic roles that come along like this, especially now, at my age,” she told me over Arnold Palmers at the Crosby Bar. “It came at a time in my life where I felt ready to really sink my teeth into it.”
Since making her Broadway debut as Dinah the Dining Car in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 1987 musical Starlight Express, Krakowski has originated every subsequent character she’s played onstage. This meant she was accustomed to certain practices: workshops, a lengthy rehearsal process, previews where she could fine-tune her performance with a live audience. But she had just two weeks to learn Oh, Mary! before her first show, which would essentially double as her opening night.
Furthermore: “I’ve never had my own T-shirt and poster before,” she notes, referring to the show’s robust merchandising. “I’ve also never been on the marquee!”
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“Jane is the hardest worker in showbiz, full stop, and one of the most exacting, precise comedians I have ever worked with,” says Pinkleton, who met Krakowski when he choreographed the National Theatre production of Stephen Sondheim’s final musical, Here We Are, in which she appeared. “She is a genius show-person just like Mary, but she’s also a real actress. She navigates Mary’s hairpin turns like a laser beam, but can also deliver the razzle dazzle that the play requires.”
Krakowski’s powers were on full display during her first performance. From the moment she burst through the doors of the Oval Office, the audience couldn’t stop showering the 57-year-old performer with adoration. I’ve seen the show six times now, and on several occasions Krakowski’s delivery made me feel like I was hearing the material for the first time. Her Mary retains the manic spirit of Escola’s Tony-winning performance while still feeling wholly her own.
“The response felt beautifully giant that first night,” Krakowski recalls. “And the crazy thing is now that we’re quite far into the run, it’s sorta felt that way every show.”
This moment has been a long time coming for Krakowski, who grew up in the suburb of Parsippany, New Jersey. Her father, a chemical engineer, and mother, a theater teacher at William Paterson University, would often take her and her older brother into Manhattan to see whatever Broadway show people were buzzing about, from Annie to Hair. (“They did draw the line at Oh! Calcutta!”) She remembers seeing the original 1975 production of Chicago with Chita Rivera and having her eight-year-old world absolutely rocked.
“Seeing Chicago was my first ‘I wanna do that’ moment,” she remembers. “Here were these quirky, sexy women you didn’t typically see leading musicals, dancing and singing and doing everything I wanted to do.”
Krakowski’s first audition turned into her first paid gig when she booked The Milliken Breakfast Show, which ran for two weeks in the Grand Ballroom of the Waldorf Astoria Hotel. Part musical comedy, part infomercial, the production was sponsored by the textile manufacturer Milliken Company, which employed some of New York’s top performers to wear Milliken fabrics and sing Broadway standards with Milliken-ized lyrics. The audiences were composed almost entirely of buyers and garment executives for all the major department stores, so chorus members would shout out the designers of their stage outfits between numbers (“Halston!” “Levi Strauss!”).
“Everybody wanted to do it because Milliken paid so well,” Krakowski says. Famed choreographer Michael Bennett brought in all his best dancers, who would perform on Broadway at night then get up early the next morning to do the Breakfast Show, which started promptly at 7 a.m. Bennett was fresh off multiple Tony wins for his work on A Chorus Line, which Krakowski saw some 13 times; she loved the musical the way most nine-year-olds at the time loved Star Wars. (Krakowski even showed up to our interview at the Crosby wearing Chorus Line merch that she bought in the late ‘70s: “Still fits!”)
Milliken was high-profile enough that Krakowski transferred from her suburban high school to the Professional Children’s School in Manhattan, which catered to working child actors, and signed with an agent, who put her up for every commercial, voiceover gig, and TV movie that she made sense for. Krakowski went on to play Marta von Trapp in a regional tour of The Sound of Music, and appeared in an Off-Off-Broadway production of A Little Night Music staged in a church.
Her first “big break” came when she snagged a role in National Lampoon’s Vacation playing Vicki, the trailer trash daughter of Randy Quaid’s character. Though her part was too small for an invitation to the premiere, Krakowski went to see it opening night with some friends at a local theater. Watching her character mix a jug of Kool-Aid with her bare hands, Krakowski remembers hearing the crowd crackle with laughter. “That was the first time I realized that people found me capable of being funny,” she says.
Soon after the release of Vacation, Krakowski was booked on the CBS soap Search for Tomorrow. She beat out a then-unknown Jennifer Aniston for the role of Theresa Rebecca “T.R.” Kendall, a teen runaway who joins the circus before getting taken in by the wealthy Kendall family. She refers to her time on the soap as an “acting boot camp” of sorts: they usually shot up to 14 pages of dialogue a day, compared to the standard five or six pages that most network dramas aim for. The actors would rehearse a scene once before shooting a single take and immediately moving on to the next one. “I learned how to play some crazy-ass shit,” Krakowski says. “But I learned how to think on my feet and make immediate decisions.”
While Krakowski made her Broadway debut in the aforementioned Starlight Express, it was her scintillating turn in the 1989 musical Grand Hotel that made her a star to watch. She played Flaemmchen, a typist-for-hire and wannabe actress with dreams of moving to Hollywood (something of a recurring motif across Krakowski’s work). Adapted from the Joan Crawford film about a colorful group of characters staying at a luxury hotel in Berlin, Grand Hotel received fairly tepid reviews when it premiered in Boston. A new composer was brought in for rewrites before it went to Broadway, reworking and cutting songs on a daily basis. During the first month of previews, Krakowski spent every day learning a new number before each performance. The heavily retooled Grand Hotel eventually opened to rave reviews, with Krakowski earning her first Tony nomination.
“I was a musical theater-obsessed teenager and Jane in Grand Hotel was both my religion and my sexual orientation,” Pinkleton says. “Falling in love with her on 30 Rock came later, but Jane is first and foremost a Broadway star to me.”
After Grand Hotel, Krakowski popped up in scene-stealing character parts across the New York stage. In 1996 alone she appeared in an Encores! production of One Touch of Venus at the New York City Center, an adaptation of Tartuffe that reimagined the titular charlatan as a Southern televangelist, and a revival of the musical comedy Once Upon a Mattress with her former Milliken co-star Sarah Jessica Parker.
It was while Krakowski was starring in the latter that she got a call from David E. Kelley’s production company, the behemoth behind hit network dramas like L.A. Law and The Practice. They wanted Krakowski to audition for his upcoming series, a legal comedy called Ally McBeal. She flew out to Los Angeles in coach and, after nailing her final audition, went back first-class.
When Krakowski joined the cast of Ally McBeal, her character, Elaine Vassal, was still mostly imagined as a flirty secretary. A scene from the Season 1 episode “Happy Birthday Baby” demonstrates Krakowski’s ability to wring emotional honesty out of offbeat material. During a tender exchange between Ally and Elaine, the latter explains why she craves attention so much. Elaine recalls a painful memory from the fourth grade, when her parents couldn’t afford to buy her a new bike. “I even tried selling myself to the boys at recess for a nickel, and I did save up enough to buy a bell, and I’d put it on if I ever did get a bike,” she tells Ally. Elaine didn’t get that new bike, “but I made a lot of noise with that bell.”
“That show made me more known to people outside of the New York theater world because at its peak, 15 million people were watching it every week,” Krakowski says. “It completely changed my life.” (“Jane has had my heart by the balls since I first saw her on Ally McBeal,” Escola tells me. “She is so lovable and effortless as unhinged characters that it’s as if unhinged is Jane’s first language and she’s just translating them for us.”)
After five seasons of Ally McBeal, which was shot in Los Angeles, Krakowski returned to Broadway in a big way with the 2003 revival of Nine. The musical, about a film director named Guido Contini contending with a midlife crisis, starred the likes of Antonio Banderas, Laura Benanti, and Chita Rivera—but Krakowski’s turn as Guido’s mistress was a highlight. Dangling from the ceiling in silks meant to resemble a bedsheet (the work of aerial performance troupe AntiGravity), she brought the house down every night with her steamy rendition of “A Call From the Vatican.”
“Sometimes I look back at things I’ve done in my career and wonder where I got the gall, or even just the stamina,” Krakowski remarks. “But I’ve always relished the disciplinary rigors that being in a show like Nine requires.” At the end of her siren song, the bedsheet would hoist Krakowski 50 feet into the air—legs first—as she hit her final, transcendent note.
Rivera remarked to her at one point that they were cut from the same cloth, saying, “You’re like me, where unless you’re in an ambulance, you’re going onstage.” “I take care of myself now,” Krakowski says, “but there was a time where I felt the pressure to run myself into the ground.”
Her commitment paid off when she won the Tony Award for best featured actress in a musical. “I have to thank the people at AntiGravity, who taught me everything you can do on a bedsheet,” Krakowski quipped during her acceptance speech. “Well, not everything, but what you see at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre!”
Of all the prospects that came her way after Nine, none excited Krakowski more than a script for what was then called Untitled Tina Fey Project. Based on her time as head writer at Saturday Night Live, the pilot for what would eventually become 30 Rock introduces Liz Lemon (Fey) as she oversees the cast and crew of a fictional sketch comedy show while dealing with a pompous new boss. Krakowski was immediately mad for the part of the egomaniacal actress Jenna Maroney.
“Tina wanted her to be blonde in both hair color and in spirit,” says Krakowski, who had to audition three times and do a chemistry read with Fey before booking the role. Once Krakowski was cast, the writers leaned into her natural theatricality by making Jenna even more of a foil to Liz. “If Liz was going to be a functioning and well-educated adult,” she says, “they needed Jenna to be totally out-of-control.”
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Every member of 30 Rock’s ensemble had their moment, but judging by the number of YouTube compilations with names like “Jenna Maroney’s MOST UNHINGED moments!” or “Jenna Maroney’s deranged energy for 9 minutes straight,” it’s fair to say that Krakowski often stole the show. Her ability to sell the most demented line readings with a doe-eyed smile—and to thrive in the show’s rat-a-tat pacing—gave 30 Rock some of its funniest moments. (My personal favorite: “Oh, I can play dead. I watched my whole church group get eaten by a bear.”)
Twenty years after the pilot episode premiered, people still frequently shout their favorite lines at Krakowski on the street. (“Listen up, fives, a 10 is speaking!” is the most popular.) Now that she’s back on Broadway, several people have told her that they hope she wins the Tony Award for “Living Theatrically in Normal Life.” Even the maître d’ at the Crosby Bar snuck in a quick, “You’re so iconic” when he sat us in a corner booth. “I swear I didn’t pay him to do that,” she tells me.
Krakowski signs all manner of 30 Rock memorabilia at the Oh, Mary! stage door every night, most of it fan-made: a poster for The Rural Juror, a bedazzled “Business Slut” shirt, a Jennas-Side.com ball-cap. “A lot of the people who were too young to watch 30 Rock on the air are now binge-watching it and making T-shirts,” she says, showing me one she was gifted with a logo for the Royal Tampa Academy of Dramatic Tricks, Jenna’s alma mater.
She often hears from fans that it was their comfort show during COVID, or just something they watch when they need a laugh. “It feels like something that’s quite meaningful to the people who love it.” After 30 Rock, Krakowski returned to the stage in an acclaimed revival of She Loves Me, before starring as Emily Dickinson’s mother in three seasons of the Apple TV+ series Dickinson. She also appeared in episodes of everything from Curb Your Enthusiasm to Modern Family, and reunited with Fey for her 30 Rock follow-up The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.
The similarities between Jenna and Mary Todd aren’t lost on Krakowski: Both characters are born performers who will stop at nothing to achieve their showbiz dreams. The first time she saw Oh, Mary!, Krakowski was particularly tickled by the line, “Why would I throw an entire woman down the stairs? Because it’s hilarious?” (“Jenna Maroney totally would’ve said that,” Krakowski says.)
“If you look up ‘show business’ in a dictionary, there is a photo of Ethel Merman which Jane has crossed out and replaced with a photo of herself,” Escola tells me. “That’s Mary. In fact, I should probably have asked her for advice when I played Mary.”
Krakowski feels reinvigorated by her latest Broadway run, which ends on Sunday, January 4. “I have a new moxie that wasn’t there before Mary,” she says. “I love what I do so much that I hope I can do it for as long as possible.”
Oh, Mary! fans are already campaigning for her to appear in Escola’s Miss Piggy film—fitting, given the Muppet was one of the key inspirations for Krakowski’s take on Mary Todd (the other was Laura Keene). She’d love to work more directly with Escola, and to reunite with Sedaris and Fey in some capacity. Krakowski has also been listening to Amy Poehler’s Good Hang podcast recently, and says Poehler would be a dream co-star.
“I’ve met Amy many times just from being in Tina Fey’s orbit, and she seems like the greatest lady,” she says. “I’m a massive fan of her kindness and humor and view of the world.”
Krakowski doesn’t have anything lined up in the immediate aftermath of her final bow as Mary Todd, but she’s not counting anything out these days—including a potential return to the role, if asked. But for now, she’s most excited to start off 2026 with a well-deserved break before working out what comes next.
“I hope the parts come, but hey, even if they don’t, it’s lovely to have this feeling of optimism,” Krakowski says as we part ways in front of the Crosby Street Hotel. “I feel refreshed in a way that makes me feel excited for the future.”
In this story: Styling by Gabriel Held. Hair, Marco Santini; makeup: Mary Wiles. Photographed at The Pierre Hotel and the Lyceum Theatre.