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

No matter the outcome of the Tony Awards 2025 on Sunday, Cole Escola was destined for a Cinderella moment. It wasn’t enough that the playwright and star of Oh, Mary! had a sweeping powder-blue Wiederhoeft gown waiting for them Friday at their final fitting, when they burst into the designer’s atelier in New York’s Garment District about 10 minutes behind schedule, they were missing part of their shoe. Damsel, meet distress.

“Sorry, my shoes, they just—fell apart,” Escola explained breathlessly, whipping off a pair of dark sunglasses. On the walk over, the outsole had peeled off one beige leather ballet-like flat, then the other. They were still wearing the shoes and seemed reluctant to toss them, even though they were holding the detached black rubber soles in one hand. “Of course, everything disintegrates.”

All this happened before Escola had their belle-of-the-ball moment Sunday onstage in that same intricately beaded gown, which was inspired by the one Bernadette Peters wore at the 1999 Tony Awards to perform her number from Annie Get Your Gun, and then shortly thereafter to accept her best actress in a musical award for the role, having no time to change in between. Escola, dazzling in a dark auburn ringleted wig and with both shoes (Jimmy Choo, encrusted with glimmering rhinestones, including the soles) fully intact, clung to the best lead actor in a play statuette in seeming shock. Escola is the first openly nonbinary actor in Tonys history to win, and did it by playing a sauced, screeching, entirely historically inaccurate Mary Todd Lincoln, no less.

Escola was given the choice of which category they’d like to be considered for, neither gendered label a fit. “They asked me,” they told Vanity Fair Friday. “And I flipped a coin.”

“Not a penny,” they rushed to add. “RIP.”

Escola “didn’t even think it was a possibility” they’d be nominated when the inquiry came last summer around the time of the show’s Broadway opening. But then when nominations were announced on May 1, there they were waking up without an alarm thanks to nerves. Once their name was read, right there with George Clooney and Daniel Dae Kim and the rest, shock forced a system shutdown: “I went back to sleep because I was overwhelmed.”

When debating whether the Tonys should change the gendered categories, Escola had a few notes.

“They should do it based on where you piss, and that’s what they should call it: Best performance by a person who uses a urinal. I sit down to pee, so I would go in that category, best performance by an actor who sits down to piss. I mean, that’s basically what they are now. Why don’t they call it that?”

There’s some mulling in the assembled group, which includes stylist David Moses, designer Jackson Wiederhoeft, and Escola’s friend and assistant, Ethan Fruist, about whether there should be a special Tony for those who might use a catheter.

The veer into catheter chat is a clear diversion: Escola says they “love surprises,” but they’re not a weeper. “I just go internal and shut down,” which is how they approached the possibility (turned reality at the ceremony Sunday) of actually winning. They hadn’t prepared a speech—and wouldn’t.

“I just haven’t had time,” Escola said, then admitted, “And I don’t know, thinking about it makes me sick, so I think more about the dress and what I’m gonna wear. And now the dress is finished, so we gotta worry about the hair, the makeup. I really like Bernadette’s. She used to always love a coral lip, something peachy with that blue would be nice. I always love fake freckles, so I ask for fake freckles. Sun-kissed.”

For someone who has openly said they did “less than none” research about the real Mary Todd Lincoln for Oh, Mary!, and claimed Friday to VF that “I don’t love learning. I try not to,” their Tonys look is full of historical and personal references. There’s the sartorial and follicular nod to Peters (the final wig, created by John Novotny, scans as Peters-meets-Titanic-era-Kate Winslet), but also to Escola’s journey to Broadway and the Tonys. In the early aughts, when Escola was carving out their niche with web videos, they had a recurring bit doing an impression of Peters—one who was confident and glamorous and mugging for the audience, even when she had no idea what she was talking about. In 2009, there was Escola-as-Peters reviewing movies she hadn’t seen, and then vamping onstage as Peters a decade later while singing about “falling down outside again,” complete with sweeping hand gestures. The ongoing Peters bit maps well onto Escola’s dreams of becoming a theater legend themself, in their own mold.

When asked whether Peters has seen any of it, Escola says, “I hope not.” Peters has seen Oh, Mary!, however, and went backstage to meet Escola, who had joked in summer 2024 to reserve two house seats for her “for every show with a spotlight on them.” “I have a one-sided storied history with her,” they say now. Of that backstage meeting, they recall, “She was very gracious. I tried not to—I would understand if she wanted nothing to do with me, and I keep that in my mind. She just saw the show and was very kind.”

Escola’s gown replaces the medallions of Peters’ 1999 dress bodice with a heavily beaded silver motif inspired by embellishments on historical doors, an abstract reference to the passage of time and naiveté, Wiederhoeft said. He wanted the hand-beaded and hand-sewn corseted dress, which is the result of a team of 40–50 people, to look “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 group toyed with how to interpret the past through the lens of the present, the same way that Oh, Mary! does, and Hamilton and Annie Get Your Gun did (“it was the 1890s through the lens of 1990s,” Escola noted). Ultimately, Peters’s Tonys gown is reimagined through the fun house mirrors of time, gender, and detail.

But this isn’t a Peters obsession taken to an extreme. Or at least, it’s not just that. “The dress is really about the color,” Escola said. “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 remember watching that performance and win in small-town Oregon? “I should say yes, so I’m gonna lie.” They joked that in 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 currently 38 years old, and they do remember watching Peters perform during the Tonys for Gypsy (2003), and “the years that Rosie O’Donnell hosted; I remember those fondly.”

More historical references abound in the look. They’ve reluctantly learned more about the real Mary Todd Lincoln, it seems, despite Escola’s proclamation that their favorite part of a childhood visit to Ford’s Theater, where Abraham Lincoln was fatally shot, was “this tree covered in gum” outside the historic site. With insincere apologies to the preserved bloodstained bedding across the street, they say, “That’s the Lincoln legacy: gum.” Escola wore a Georgian-era paste pendant around their neck, sourced by an ex of stylist Moses, who is an antique jewelry dealer. In the center of the ring of glimmer, underneath a stylized bejeweled bow, a black-and-white headshot of a woman in three-quarters profile gazed out: Laura Keene, the actor who was the star of Our American Cousin, the show Lincoln was watching when he was shot.

“One of the things that happened after he was assassinated is [Keene] got, allegedly, blood on her sleeve,” they explained. As lore would have it, “She, like, cradled his head. Allegedly. It doesn’t make a lot of sense, like why would the star actress bring him water, but that’s the story. But so this sleeve is now, like, in a museum.”

Escola even had Coach make a pair of custom shoes ahead of attending their show in February 2025, featuring a motif shaped like the bloodstain. (“I had to email Coach and literally be like, ‘Hey, this is a picture of a blood-stained piece of fabric from Lincoln’s assassination. Can you design that?’” Moses recalled, laughing.) The team wanted to keep the Keene thread going through the Tonys, hence the prominent placement of her portrait. They considered putting the show’s namesake, Antoinette Perry, in the piece, “but I think Laura is more important.”

The pendant hung from a powder blue ribbon color-matched and created by Wiederhoeft, fussed over and adjusted at the fitting, and finally snipped to length with the final touch: two silvery beaded tassels, safety pinned to the ends for finishing before the show.

Escola sported jewel-encrusted nails for the ceremony, created by Naomi Yasuda, who also designs sets for Madonna. “I love saying that,” Moses said, holding a clear clamshell case containing several thumbnail options for optimal fit. The accessories for Escola’s look were kept minimal in number and maximal in sparkle, allowing the actor in the gown to be the main event.

Escola kept things brief and sly on the real hot-button questions, like the hubbub around whether Patti LuPone, whom they have been photographed with, should attend the ceremony after her statements about Kecia Lewis and Audra McDonald in a recent interview prompted an open letter saying she should be banned. “I think it should be left up to the states,” Escola said. “Small government, local! ‘Run for something,’ that’s my message.” (The states, or LuPone herself, ultimately voted “no” on attending.) The other debate tearing the country apart, whether Ivy or Karen deserved the part of Marilyn Monroe in TV’s Smash—in which Escola had a one-line role (they were a coat check attendant, and recited their line Friday: “Hey, what are you doing in here?”), and the stage adaptation of which recently opened on Broadway—should also, according to Escola, be decided on the state level.

But there’s one thing they’re as sure of as the gratitude they will show to “Tebow from Grindr” in their acceptance speech: They aren’t going to play Mary Todd Lincoln forever. While currently doing their second spin in the role on Broadway—after taking a break and passing the hoop skirt to Betty Gilpin and then Tituss Burgess—they said, “I was always going to come back to close it, that was the plan. It just kept getting extended, and I was like, I need a break, but I’ll come back to close it. And now I’m back and it’s not closing, but I have to be done. I’m going to say goodbye to Mary.”

Mary Todd Lincoln, Escola said, “would love and admire and respect Bernadette Peters,” but “I think she would loathe and detest and abhor me. And I live with that every day.”