Thirty-seven-year-old Darren Criss is a star on Broadway, and a regular at piano bars. “Keep the music going, you know?” he said. “I think the expression goes, ‘Life is a cabaret!'”
When he’s in Los Angeles, it’s Tramp Stamp Granny’s, where he and his wife, Mia, are the owners. “It’s kind of a beautiful little Hollywood tale,” he said. “She slings the drinks, and I sling the tunes.”
One rule in a piano bar? Play the hits. Criss had his first hit 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.
“This was a very interesting moment in time,” he said, of “A Very Potter Musical.” “That really did kind of change my life. That would kind of set me on the path to where I am now.”
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 sort of decide the validity of that,” Criss said.
But Criss took a detour on his way to Broadway, by becoming a TV 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 that show to the sub-cultural fan base army that we had gathered from the Potter stuff,” he said.
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.”
Now he 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 “joyful,” “heartbreaking,” and “supersmart.”
Criss said, “This show begins with a song which is the question the show posits: Why love? Why do we do it? If we know that loving something enters you in a contract that has an inexorable back end – which is the loss of something – why do we do that, if we know that that’s gonna happen?”
According to Criss, this show came along 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 son.
I asked, “Does this feel like the best year of your life?”
“Well, it certainly is a blessed one,” Criss laughed. “I’ve had some extraordinary years of my life, and I think this has been a certainly exciting time.”
He’s had some hard years, too. In 2020, his father, Bill, died at 78 from a heart condition. In 2022, his brother, Chuck, died at 36 by suicide.
Criss said, “I don’t necessarily think of my own experience with those people specifically in my life that I have lost. But I do think about the feeling of loss, the sadness and emptiness and loneliness that that yields, because we all feel it. But the things that move me, in life and in [“Maybe Happy Ending”], are not the darkness of the loss, but the Herculean grace that it takes to be resilient in the inevitable truth of that.”
When he thinks about that, Darren Criss can’t help but sing.
“I count my lucky stars every day,” he laughed. “I’m runnin’ out of – there’s too many! They’re still showing up. I’m doing ‘CBS Sunday Morning’!”
Story produced by Mary Raffalli. Editor: Lauren Barnello.
