Darren Criss, 37, is a Broadway star and piano bar regular. “Keep the music going, you know?” he said. “I think the expression says: ‘Life is a cabaret!'”
When he’s in Los Angeles, it’s Tramp Stamp Granny’s, which he and his wife, Mia, own. “It’s kind of a beautiful little Hollywood tale,” he said. “She starts the drinks and I start the music.”
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A rule in a piano bar? Play the hits. Criss had his first success at the University of Michigan. He starred as Harry Potter in an unauthorized student show based on the books that became a YouTube sensation in 2009.
“It was a very interesting moment,” he said of “A Very Potter Musical.” “It really changed my life. It kind of set me on the path to where I am now.”
From 2009: The unofficial parody show “A Very Potter Musical”:
I asked if “A Very Potter Musical” was the first musical to go viral. “I don’t know; I guess we’ll let the YouTube historians decide the validity of that,” Criss said.
But Criss took a detour to go to Broadway, becoming a television star. “‘Glee’ was happening at the time,” he said. “And I went out for it, like hundreds of thousands of other people in my situation at that time. And I happened to book it.”
He played Blaine Anderson and quickly became a fan favorite. “I owe my tenure on this show to the army of subcultural fans we had amassed from the Potter stuff,” he said.
Watch Blaine Anderson (Darren Criss) perform Katy Perry’s “Teenage Dream” on “Glee”:
Criss went on to win an Emmy and a Golden Globe for his portrayal of serial killer Andrew Cunanan in “The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story.”
He now plays an obsolete robot named Oliver in a new musical, “Maybe Happy Ending,” one of the most acclaimed shows currently on Broadway. The New York Times calls it “joyous,” “heartbreaking,” and “super smart.”
Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman/”Maybe a Happy Ending”
Criss said: “This series begins with a song that is the question the series asks: Why love? Why do we do it? If we know that loving something puts you into a contract that has an inexorable end – which is the loss of something – why do we do this, if we know it will happen?
According to Criss, this show came at the perfect time. He and his wife, Mia, have a two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, and earlier this year they welcomed a baby boy.
I asked, “Does this feel like the best year of your life?”
“Well, that’s certainly a blessing,” Criss laughed. “I’ve had some extraordinary years in my life and I think it’s certainly been an exciting time.”
He too had difficult years. In 2020, his father, Bill, died at age 78 due to heart disease. In 2022, his brother, Chuck, committed suicide at age 36.
Criss said, “I don’t necessarily think about my own experience with those people specifically in my life that I lost. But I think about the feeling of loss, the sadness, the emptiness and the loneliness that it brings, because we all feel But the things that move me, in life and in [“Maybe Happy Ending”]is not the darkness of loss, but the Herculean grace it takes to be resilient in the face of the inevitable truth of it. »
When he thinks of this, Darren Criss can’t help but sing.
“I count my lucky stars every day,” he laughed. “I don’t have any anymore – there are too many! They’re still there. I do ‘CBS Sunday Morning’!”
You can stream the holiday album “A Very Darren Crissmas” by clicking the embed below (free Spotify membership required to hear the tracks in full):
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Story produced by Mary Raffalli. Editor: Lauren Barnello.
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Watch these special holiday music performances from Darren Criss for “Sunday Morning”:
