Dylan Mulvaney Turned Her Bud Light Culture War Into a Musical. And It’s Spectacular.

The terminally online might feel like they’re experts on the comings and goings of 27-year-old trans actress Dylan Mulvaney—particularly her 9.5 million TikTok followers and 1.6 million Instagram followers. For many millions more, Mulvaney represents an enigmatic lightning rod for socio-political debates about trans rights, thanks to her highly visible daily documentation of her first year living as a woman.

Seven months into her “Days of Girlhood,” Mulvaney received a White House invitation to meet with President Joe Biden in a forum with NowThisNews. That didn’t cause nearly as much uproar as what happened on April 1, 2023, when Mulvaney posted a sponsored video promoting Bud Light’s March Madness campaign and thanked the beer giant for sending her a can with her likeness on it as a gift celebrating her first anniversary as a woman. Far-right conservatives called for a Bud Light boycott, led by Kid Rock posting his own video shooting up beer cans.

Now, 16 months later, what do we really know about Mulvaney?

She has broken out of the social media screen to reclaim her narrative IRL with costume changes and musical numbers galore, debuting her slickly produced one-woman musical, F--HAG, at the Edinburgh Fringe in Scotland. Mulvaney describes her show as “a campy, queer love letter to my younger self, and my way of taking my story off of social media and onto the stage.”

Directed by Tim Jackson, who choreographed the Tony-winning revival of Merrily We Roll Along this past season on Broadway, Mulvaney’s debut features original songs, plus video cameos from Jonathan Van Ness and RuPaul’s Drag Race judge Ts Madison, and a cardboard cutout of Glee’s Chris Colfer standing in for Mulvaney’s junior co-worker at a Lush cosmetics store.

Mulvaney also made the decision to slightly fictionalize the Bud Light episode, changing the beer name to represent part of a broader corporate brand—cheekily named Trans Palatability—and at one point portraying an unnamed bearded male country singer who shoots the beer cans with a squirt gun. That action takes place on screen behind the stage, as do other characterizations of variously gendered TV news anchors and a male Costco employee who prescribes the younger Mulvaney a medication called “Twink.”

Mulvaney’s musical theater chops shouldn’t be underestimated. Pre-transition, Mulvaney performed in the ensemble of the national touring Broadway production of The Book of Mormon from July 2019 until the shutdowns of March 2020.

In Edinburgh, she is so far performing to excitedly packed crowds that on the night this writer attended delivered a raucous standing ovation.

From the opening moments of the musical—where she’s not waiting in the wings, but rather bounding up and down the aisles to greet audience members while wearing angelic wings—to a closing singalong where Mulvaney proclaims she’s a woman born in a gay man’s body who isn’t completely gay but still remains a woman, she is shining in this spotlight.

In between, she recounts how as young as age 4, she’d already told her conservative Catholic mother that she was meant to be a girl; how her own relationship with God and her best friend changed as she attended Catholic school in San Diego; and how everything in her life turned upside-down when she gained fame and infamy as a social-media influencer.

“Turns out late-stage capitalism and misogyny was responsible for my demise,” she quips on stage late in the show.

There’s not much mention of her father (or her grandfather, James F. Mulvaney, Sr., who served as president of the Padres baseball team), but there’s plenty about her emotional and political struggles with her mother. They wound up estranged when Dylan transitioned. In the end, we hear a phone message from her mom suggesting Dylan perhaps “tone it down” and not be so “much” moving forward.

Another suggestion, heard but unseen from God, comes in the form of a potion named even more pointedly: Nuance. Mulvaney drinks up Nuance hoping for the best.

She thinks it’s possible TERFs or conservatives such as her mom have radicalized against the trans community simply because they’re upset that they have lost their gay male friends in the process. But Mulvaney quickly adds a joking disclaimer that she couldn’t afford the liability insurance to delve any deeper into that theory.

Nevertheless, she will persist, declaring, “Nothing will ever be enough for those f---ers.”

Dylan Mulvaney Lays Into Bud Light for Abandoning HerRADIO SILENCE

Isabella Ramirez, Brett Bachman