Justin J Wee.
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 the idea of interpreting the past from 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) and now yet another interpretation of Peters’ Tonys gown through several fun-house mirrors of time, gender, and detail.
But this isn’t a Peters obsession taken to the extreme. Or at least, 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.”