BIG TEASE WOW, PART 4: COMPOSER AND PIANIST JIM MERILLAT

On his 50 years of experience and work at Marie's Crisis piano bar

Normally on a Monday morning I drop the weekly Wow. But I had one more interview that I’ve done recently and really love, and I wanted to tease it. I hope you like it.

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If you’ve been reading this newsletter for very long, you know that I have a lot of love for Marie’s Crisis, the gay singalong show tunes piano bar in Greenwich Village. I first encountered their staff during the pandemic. Every single night of the pandemic the staff of Marie’s Crisis did 7 hours of live music on Facebook, taking requests from those watching and being paid entirely on tips.

It was a really incredible act of generosity on their part, and when I moved to New York in the summer of 2021, I made a beeline for the place.

Jim Merillat has a fifty year history with the bar. His brother took him there when he was a teenager visiting New York. When he moved to New York as an adult it became one of his regular hangouts. In more recent years he’s joined the staff as a pianist, playing the early shifts on Tuesdays. (He likes to kid he’s both the oldest pianist at the bar and the newest.) In 2021 on the day that Stephen Sondheim died, Jim was the early evening pianist at Marie’s; he was interviewed by the New York Times.

I’m really fascinated with Marie’s, how people come to find the place and what it does for them. A couple weeks ago, I got to interview Jim about his experiences there.

Before you went to Marie’s for the first time had you heard about it?

No.

What do you remember from your first time walking in?

We walk in—and this actually goes to how I play there now and what I enjoy playing a little bit. People will say, “Would you play the title tune from Mame?” The way the song is routinely done in the show, in the middle there’s this almost-patter, this whispered spoken patter. Normally in the published music that doesn’t even exist. You get a copy of the song, you don’t see that. So you have to be playing out of a score to play that. And so we go in, and the pianist playing Mame, when they get to the point where it would just end, the vocal selections, they did that whole interstitial middle section. To me that was like, Oh this is like serious. This isn’t just we’re going to sing a show tune, we’re going to do the song, the whole thing. I was in Heaven.

Was it crowded?

I don’t remember it being really really crowded. But there was a crowd there, and it was all gay men.

I’ve heard you tell that story of them all singing the title number to “Mame”: Were they all actually dancing?

Yes. I don’t know that the whole bar was dancing, but there were certainly a group of men doing choreography that for all intents and purposes meant they had probably been in the show at some point in their life. And we were still close enough to it—it was only 12 years since it had been on Broadway at this point. It was fresher than Wicked is now.

But yes, it was probably 4 or 5 guys doing miniaturized choreography, kind of. Just shortly after that A Chorus Line became a thing, and everyone was learning the opening combination to A Chorus Line. Before that, it was everyone was learning the prologue Jets dance from West Side Story.

So it was sort of like that, it was guys who had learned the choreography somewhere along the line. It could have been 3 of them that knew it and 1 or 2 of them who were trying to learn it on the fly because that was fun.

When you first started going to Marie’s regularly, what was your thing? Were you sitting at the piano with the regulars who know all the words?

I would not just go sit at the piano, but I did discover that I knew the words to everything. So I would sing. I’m sure it wasn’t pleasant, I sing better now than I did then. But I knew all the words, and there was no way back then that people could look them up.

Right, no one had cell phones to look up the lyrics.

So I know whoever was playing the piano they would notice me because they had someone who knew all the words. And then they would ask for a request, and I would generally request the same song.

What was the song?

It’s called “The Folks Who Live on the Hill.” It’s by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein, it’s maybe my favorite Oscar Hammerstein lyric, it’s from a movie called High, Wide and Handsome.

I liked the song a lot. A lot of people sang it, so it wasn’t completely obscure, but it was just on the obscure side. If a pianist knew it, I knew they were going to be good.

Most pianists then didn’t use music, they just played.

From memory? Wow.

Yeah. So you’d get what you got. Sometimes they’d be figuring it out from what you were singing.

Did they still take requests?

They still took requests. And there were a few pianists that literally traveled around with a rolling suitcases full of sheet music. And the bars themselves had books that had just been left there behind the piano, like fake books so someone could look something up and see the chords and whatever.

Did you have a favorite pianist?

I did. I have a few that I became friends with, but the first person that I kind of really remember thinking he was kind of brilliant was a guy named Robin Field. (I also had a penchant for blonde boys then, too, so it didn’t hurt that he was blonde and Peter Pan-ish.) He was also a composer.

Composer and Marie’s pianist Robin Field.

He played Sunday afternoons, right after bingo. Because Marie’s used to have bingo on Sundays.

Wait, what?

Yeah, they’d open at noon and they’d have bingo ‘til 3:30 or 4. Then the pianist would start.

It would literally be someone calling bingo for hours?

Yeah, you’d buy a card for a dollar or whatever, or six cards for five or I don’t know what.

Is it still just gay men that are going to that?

Yeah. But it might not be the same group that’s going to stay for show tunes. Brandi’s used to do it, too. I had great luck with Bingo and Brandi’s. I’d usually walk out of there with three or four hundred dollars.

Wow. Sunday bingo.

I know, don’t you love it? Sunday gay bingo.

Also, you could smoke in there! So you’re singing in a haze of cigarette smoke. You go home, and your clothes smell like smoke, and you fall asleep and your pillow smells like old smoke. Even if you don’t smoke, you were smoking. It was gross.

Wow.

Half the time you have to go home and take a shower before you went to bed, because you just had it in your hair and everywhere.

That’s so gross.

Yeah. That’s how every bar was, until not that long ago.  

What was it about Robin that made him your favorite?

He was just a really good pianist and he was not particularly stuck up or anything like that. And he had a pleasant voice.

I remember there was another guy, Rick: Into the Woods had opened but before the recording was out, he had transcribed into handwritten sheet music for himself “Giants in the Sky.” It wasn’t exactly right, but it was close enough and he was the only one doing it because there was no sheet music happening at that point.  

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For more stories from Jim, including “the weird and fun and frustrating and weird and fun” experience of streaming on Facebook for 14 months during the pandemic, and what makes some songs so much more fun to play at Marie’s than others, subscribe to the Wow!

Today is the final day to get the current subscription prices. Thanks to all who have subscribed. I’m excited to share more with you soon!