Cole Escola on Tony Drama and Their Cinderella-Meets-Bernadette Peters Look on the Tony Awards 2025

Escola’s robe replaces the medallions of Peters’ 1999 get dressed bodice with a closely beaded silver motif impressed through gildings on ancient doorways, an summary connection with the passage of time and naiveté, Wiederhoeft mentioned. He sought after the hand-beaded and hand-sewn corseted get dressed, which is the results of a crew of 40–50 other folks, to appear “very ancient, in a way. It just feels really magical, like this weird time traveling.”

“The thing you said when we first tried it on,” Escola added, “was that it looked like it was resurrected from, like, a shipwreck.”

“Like this has been at the bottom of the Titanic for 100 years and we’re restoring it,” Wiederhoeft agreed.

The workforce toyed with how you can interpret the previous during the lens of the current, the similar means that Oh, Mary! does, and Hamilton and Annie Get Your Gun did (“it was the 1890s through the lens of 1990s,” Escola famous). Peters’s Tonys robe is reimagined during the a laugh area mirrors of time, gender, and element.

But this isn’t a Peters obsession taken to an excessive. Or no less than, it’s now not simply that. “The dress is really about the color,” Escola mentioned. “I mean, of course, I worship Bernadette, but if anyone else had been wearing it, I’d still love it just as much.” Did teenaged Escola keep in mind looking at that efficiency and win in small-town Oregon? “I should say yes, so I’m gonna lie.” They joked that during 1999, “I was just a young 34-year-old in my dorm in my continuing education program, watching on my little 13-inch TV, and I said, ‘I gotta wear a dress like that to that exact awards show someday,’ and the rest is history.”

They are lately 38 years previous, they usually do keep in mind looking at Peters carry out right through the Tonys for Gypsy (2003), and “the years that Rosie O’Donnell hosted; I remember those fondly.”