Community and Show-Tunes in Crisis

“We live in these little personal boxes and we break free only to find ourselves in a bigger box. I can break free for the rest of my life and still be in a box.”

“That sounds like a song cue.”

“How do you mean?”

“You’re in a piano bar. We’re all show queens.”

— Terrance McNally, Some Men

One November night in 2013, Randy Taylor was working the door at the historic Greenwich Village basement bar Marie’s Crisis. Glee star Darren Criss approached him.

“Hey, I have Lea Salonga, can we come in?” Criss asked. 

Lea Salonga’s name might be unfamiliar to anyone outside a certain set of musical obsessives, but as the voice of Jasmine and Mulan in the original Disney movies, almost everyone on earth is familiar with the sound of her singing. Randy knew her name instantly.

“You know, I’m starting to sweat because I’m a huge fan,” he later recalled. He ushered them past, despite the line snaking around the block. 

The pair walked down the small staircase into the bar. They shuffled through the crowd of people huddled around the piano, doing what people have been doing every night at Marie’s Crisis for decades: singing show tunes, under the colorful fairy lights that dangle from the low ceiling’s exposed beams. To make room for the incoming duo, patrons leaned back against the black-and-white photos of Judy Garland, Ella Fitzgerald, and Liza Minelli that adorn the back wall. Those in the front inched closer to the piano, resting their drinks on the red wooden case that separates it from the crowd.   

Criss quietly spoke to pianist Dexter Watson and took his place behind the piano. He introduced “Princess Jasmine herself” and the pair sang “A Whole New World” from Aladdin. Rapt onlookers had been granted permission to film in Marie’s for one night only, and they aggressively shushed each other during Salonga’s sections. Afterward, Dexter accompanied Lea for a rendition of “On My Own” from Les Miserables—she had played Eponine on Broadway and had reprised the role several times