THEATER WOW: The Wonderful World of Jim Merillat

A Marie's Crisis Cafe Oral History

Jim Merillat has worked in New York for a long time, as a show composer, music director, marketing executive, and accompanist (to name just a few). For the last 6 years he’s been one of the regular pianists at Marie’s Crisis Cafe in Greenwich Village, which, as many of the pianists there like to say, is the only gay singalong showtunes piano bar on that block.

(Actually most people who visit end up saying pretty quickly they’ve never seen any place like it anywhere they’ve been.)

Since the pandemic, when the staff at Marie’s made the really generous and bold decision to play music for 5 hours online every single night—I think they took one week off in 14 or 15 months—it’s been a tremendous community for me, and for a lot of others, too, for a very, very long time.

Jim’s own history with the bar goes back to 1975, when his brother John took him there. Jim and I have a number of things in common, and one of them is we like a good story. Hopefully you will, too, because we’ve got a lot of them here about Marie’s, musical theater and Jim’s own work as a composer.

I titled this “The Wonderful World of Jim Merillat,” because the word that Jim uses the most here is “wonderful.” It’s fitting, I think. I suspect you will, too.

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When did you discover you loved musical theater?

I think I was in maybe 2nd or 3rd grade. We were living in Southern Illinois, and my brother was in high school. And the high school was putting on Annie Get Your Gun. My brother wasn’t in it, I don’t think, but we went to see it. And I loved it, to the point where I begged my mother to buy me the cast recording. Our local record store of course didn’t’ have such a thing in stock, so that had to special order it.

It must have taken 6 weeks or something, and I think the record probably cost $1.25 when it came in. But when my mother and I went to buy it, it was a stereo record. And we didn’t own a stereo record player. So then we had to order a special needle for my little record player, that would convert a stereo record into mono. And that took another 4 weeks. I was just dying.

So then I had the needle, I had the record, and I would listen to it constantly. And any childhood friend I had at that moment, I would make them listen to it constantly.

Monty Angelly was probably my very first friend. He was a neighbor kid, a few years older than I was, and he came from a big Italian family. His mother would cook and I would have dinner there some time. Then I would go home and rave to my mother about Mrs. Angelly’s cooking, which you can imagine didn’t please my mother.

His family is also essentially the reason I play piano and I am a musician.

Wait, what?

They had a piano. They were a musical family. I went up there once, and Monty had a cousin who was visiting. He sat down at their piano and played the theme from the movie Exodus. The theme song was “This land is mine, God gave this land to me.” It’s about the founding of modern-day Israel, it’s this big anthemic thing. And he sounded like Ferrante and Teicher [known as “the Grand Twins of the Twin Grands,” pianists Ferrante and Teicher did a version of the song on two pianos] but he was just one person, playing with all of these runs and tremolos. I was mesmerized. (He was probably very cute too;  that whole family was attractive.)

So I went home and I told my parents that I wanted to learn how to play the piano. And they were like, We’re not buying you a piano.

And I said, You have to understand, this is my life, this is what I need. And they said, We’re not buying you a piano, it will be just like the unicycle, or this thing and that thing that we bought you that just sits in the garage collecting dust. 

But I kept begging them for a piano, from 3^rd grade on. Finally when I was in 7^th grade, they went, Alright we’ll find a cheap piano. So then I took three years of piano lessons, and then we moved to a different place.

I’ve often heard you tell the story of how your brother took you to Marie’s for the first time, when you were just a teenager. Before that visit had you heard about the place?

No.

So what was the context of your brother taking you there?

My brother had moved down to this apartment on Washington Street, I want to say.

He’d lived in New York a while at this point?  

He had. He started on the Upper East Side. In fact his old building was the building The Jeffersons credits used when they’re moving on up to the East Side.

This was 1975. I was 17.

And we walk into Marie’s and the pianist is playing the title tune from Mame—actually, this goes to how I play at Marie’s now and why I enjoy playing a little bit. 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.

So we go in, and the pianist is playing Mame, and they did that whole interstitial middle section. To me that was like, Oh this is serious. This isn’t just we’re going to sing a show tune, we’re going to do the song. 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.

So you walk down the steps into the bar, it’s all gay men, they’re doing the full version of “Mame,” and I’ve heard you say some were dancing, too.  

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

Shortly after that A Chorus Line became this thing, and everyone was learning the opening combination. Before that, it was everyone was learning the Jets dance from West Side Story, the clicking and humping and gliding. 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.

For those who read my piece about Mel Brooks last week, the actor/dancer/wonderful human Jimmy Borstelmann that I mentioned is the dancer just to the left of Bebe Neuwirth.

There’s a moment you always mention from that night, when your brother taught you “The Gay National Anthem.”

We were there for a while, and at some point the pianist started playing this song. And my brother, John Cleveland Merillat, turned to me. And he was tall, so he kind of looked down at me, and he whispered, Jim, this is the Gay National Anthem.

It seems ridiculous at this point, but it felt like a very solemn moment at the time, I gotta say. And the song was “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.”

You’ve told me before, your brother was not a Showtunes Gay.

No he wasn’t. He liked opera. But because of his history with Pride marches and protests after Stonewall, I think that song was an important thing for him. I think it resonated because Judy had been buried on that day [that the cops moved on Stonewall and people rioted].

When you came back to live in New York yourself, and started going to Marie’s, what was your typical location in the bar: Were you sitting at the piano with the regulars who know all the words, standing nearby, sitting at the bar?

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

Right, no cell phones to look up lyrics.

So whoever was playing the piano 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,” from a movie called High, Wide and Handsome.  It’s by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein, and it’s maybe my favorite Oscar Hammerstein lyric.

I liked the song a lot. 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.

They had all the music in their heads?

Yeah. So you’d get what you got.

Did they still take requests?

They still took requests. Sometimes they’d be figuring things out from what you were singing.

And there were a few pianists that literally traveled around with a rolling suitcases full of sheet music. 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 remember thinking was kind of brilliant was a guy named Robin Fields. (I also had a penchant for blonde boys then, so it didn’t hurt that he was blonde and Peter Pan-ish.) He was also a composer.

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.

Was it still just gay men that would be 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 at Bingo at Brandi’s. I’d usually walk out of there with three to 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’d 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.

Robin was involved with another man, Bob, and they had an apartment near Washington Square. We’d go and have dinner.

I remember there was another piano player, 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.  Rick later died of AIDS.

What was it like for you being there as a patron?

There was tons of stuff I enjoyed singing. But I never placed my voice correctly when I was singing, so I would always end up really straining and sounding awful and horrible and feeling bad afterward. I just didn’t have a lot of sound.

As soon as the pianist would play what I would call “big voice” songs like “Climb Every Mountain” or “You’ll Never Walk Alone” or “On the Street Where You Live” or “Maybe This Time,” I never had the voice. So as soon as I heard the introduction, I  wouldn’t sing, because I knew I’m going to hurt myself, I’m not going to feel good.

I don’t think I avoid them now, but maybe I do a little bit?

At the time would you say Marie’s was cruise-y?

It was never a place that I would have gone to pick someone up, or if I wanted to be picked up. However that all works, that wasn’t the place you would necessarily go. But a lot of hook-ups happened at Marie’s at the time, and I assume still do.

I want to go back to your own work for a minute. How did you come to realize you wanted to write musical theater, rather than just appreciate it?

One summer in high school a friend had given me a book, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay on Self-Reliance. It was like an oversized paperback with photos of hippies and things in it. It was a 70s book. I still have it somewhere.

This cover is from 1967 and something tells me Emerson would definitely be wondering WTF.

So I was reading it and I was underlining things, making notes to myself in the margins. It was all so important. (It’s so embarrassing.)

For whatever reason, I just started to write this musical sort of based on the themes of Self-Reliance. It includes a song that to the day my father died, he said it was his favorite song that I ever wrote. It was the title tune to a show called Simple Magic. I had it sung at his memorial. It was like a cross between The Fantasticks and Pippin.  Ugh, I don’t even know.

It was about a boy and a girl, he’s in love with her, and her bird dies, and she persuades him to search for the bluebird of happiness, even though he doesn’t remember her bird being blue. And of course they search the land, the sea and the sky. And then they come back all tattered and torn, and come to find out there’s this bluebird in her backyard. *laughs*

At  that point the guy who’s like the narrator, sort of like the leading player figure, is wrapping the show up to say you should look in your own backyard, just like Dorothy did.  And the actors revolt on him. They say No, this is a lie, this isn’t how this works at all. You’re feeding them a pack of lies.

Then there’s a whole section where they have to improvise how they feel about the whole thing, and the bird that the boy had with him keeps showing up in all these scenes but doesn’t even really care for him, and he says you have to let things go, and if they come back blah blah blah—it was right around the time of all that crap. So it flies around the auditorium and lands back on his shoulder.

Yeahhhh. It was horrible.

But at that point I’d already worked with some really crappy directors, I’d already performed in some really crappy musicals, stuff that wasn’t any good, and you knew there wasn’t anything you could do about it as an actor. Then I started directing, but you still had people on a play committee choosing really crappy things that then you had to do.

I had written this one thing plus a few songs for one act plays for kids or whatnot, and I knew I wanted move to New York. And there’s a thousand actors, there’s a thousand directors and there’s a hundred writers: So, where’s my shot, you know?

I got positive feedback for Simple Magic, and from people who were important to me at the time. So I moved to New York to concentrate on writing musical theater. 

Did Marie’s feed your desire to be a composer?

Not necessarily. *laughs*

I will say this, Robin Field occasionally played a song that he had written that was a really sweet tune. He only ever played the one pretty much. But it did make me go Oh, people write music and it’s good, because I also at that time I was in the BMI workshop listening to a lot people write music and it was not [good].

I went into that feeling really self-conscious, because I felt like I really didn’t have the same kind of experience or training that they had, for God’s sake I’d had three years of piano lessons, you know what I mean? But I think the thing that worked for me was that because I had been an actor and director, I approached musical theater, to this day writing for musical theater to me is about communicating a dramatic idea. I write from the dramatic point of view, I don’t write from the song point of view.

So even at the BMI I realized pretty quickly that all these people who knew how to talk all the technical stuff weren’t necessarily better or more gifted than I was as a composer.

What was the first new piece you worked on in New York?

The first work that I worked on in New York was a piece called Radio Eyes. It had several readings in the city at various venues, at Soho Rep. And then the first production was actually at Austin High School in Austin, Texas, and it was really wonderful to see it up on its feet, having spent so many years with it just as a  sort of concert-y kind of thing or demos in a studio. And it also made me realize right before we were opening  that there was one huge structural flaw with it that I had to address. But it was exciting and that was thrilling, it’s always thrilling to hear other people besides myself or who I’m collaborating with to perform things. It’s like Whoa, that sounds like a real song. That’s like, a real show.

What was really wonderful about that was that it was directed by a husband-and-wife team, Billy and Annie Dragoo, who I’m very close with now. But after that show a couple years later we ended up doing a workshop down there of Wonderland High, when we only had, like, I think we went down with 3 ½ songs and two scenes, because we wanted to talk to high school kids about their experiences and whatnot, we wanted it to sound like high school. I was already 50 probably at that point.

And so we spent like 2 weeks there, and we worked with the kids, we were writing songs in the hotel room, and then at the end of that time, it’s always important when you work with kids to have something that their parents can see what they’ve been spending their time doing when they’ve been doing it with you. So we did this little presentation. and at that point it was maybe 5 or 6 songs, 5 or 6 scenes. And at the end of the presentation, Billy said this is great, ‘This has been a great experience, thank you so much. And what I will say is, if you guys finish this we’ll do it next year.”

Wow.

I know. That was really exciting. And that’s what happened.

So that was wonderful. And that was like 2010. And then we had some people from MTI who saw it, and they were like We’ll keep an eye on it, there are some interesting things here, we want to see it again. And that first production, I don’t know, it ran forever, in terms of length. It was like 2 hours 45 minutes plus an intermission. It was really long.  *laughs*

Also I think they did 2 weekends, or 3 weekends. All I know is, in one performance we had one song in it, and by the next performance we had literally made these kids throw that song out and learn a whole new song.

Wow.

So for the students it was kind of this experimental, sort of real life kind of thing that can happen. But it doesn’t usually happen in high schools.

And weirdly enough that moment in the show actually ended up with a third rewrite after that, till it is what it is now. It’s a moment in Alice in Wonderland that needed to be on stage, the Mad Tea Party sequence, and we went through three songs before we hit what I think is right. Well I hope; it’s what’s being done now.

Jumping ahead, we had several productions in the States that we [Jim and his co-writer, lyricist Jesse Johnson] were getting people to do, and we would go and we would rewrite, redo and whatnot. And finally it was in a shape where MTI picked it up, and it’s licensed around the world now. (Listen to it here!)

And then we found out about this production that was happening in Aberdeen, Scotland, and we decided we would go. And it was fantastic. The British have a fondness for Alice in Wonderland, but that’s not what this is at all, it’s more like High School Musical meets Alice in Wonderland I guess.

So it was just wonderful to see these kids with their Scottish accents doing our show and meeting this production team that had developed a real fondness for the material. So that was wonderful.

I guess what I would really say is that the process of something starting from a germ of an idea, moving through all of the developmental stuff and finally then seeing it realized, and then seeing it realized in several different places under the watchful eyes of other directors, choreographers, music directors and whatnot is fascinating to me. It’s wonderful. I’m always just so proud that anyone besides me wants to even spend any time with it.

That’s incredible.

Is it? Okay.

Outside of your own work, what would be an experience of musical theater that has deeply affected you?

I have a writing moment and I have a performer moment. I’ll do the performer moment first. When I saw Dreamgirls  for the first time, I was in the next to the last row in the upper balcony. And two things happened. One was, I was young and excited and leaning forward, and the person behind tapped me on the shoulder and said When you lean forward, we can’t see anything. And that was the first time that I learned that you sit back in a theater seats, that’s just etiquette. And so I thanked them for that.

And then the second thing was, during that show, you get to the end of the first act and Jennifer Holliday does “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going.”

By the end of the number it was like my face was vibrating, and tears were streaming down my face. Like, I was just agape at witnessing that, because it was previews, so no one had reviewed her yet. And I remember distinctly thinking this must be what it was like seeing Barbra Streisand in Funny Girl in a preview. I felt like I was seeing someone just make themselves a star right in a moment.

My writing tale has to do with Stephen Sondheim. I remember I went to see Sunday in the Park with George, and I had standing room the first time. And so I’m just standing in the back, there’s like a little wall between you and the last row of seats in the orchestra. So I’m standing there and it got to the end of the show and this thing happened in the show that I literally had a cathartic moment, my body was racked with sobbing. I felt bad for the person sitting below me, because they had to be getting wet. I was convulsive, I was probably making ugly noises, ugly crying, because it was like Oh my God, I can’t believe I just saw what I saw.

And so then before I saw it a second time, the recording came out, and I was anxious to see how they were going to describe this moment in the liner notes. And I read the liner notes, and it wasn’t there. It wasn’t there. The most important moment in all of musical theater as far as I was concerned, wasn’t even described as having happened.

And then I thought, I was in standing room, maybe I just thought I saw what I saw and it didn’t actually happen. So I went back for a second time, and this time in the orchestra, maybe halfway down the orchestra on an aisle, and they get to his moment in the show, and I’m sitting there and I’m going, Yeah it doesn’t happen, no it doesn’t happen, clearly it doesn’t OH MY GOD IT JUST HAPPENED AGAIN. And I literally had the exact same reaction, so now I’m sobbing and wailing and gnashing my teeth in the middle of the orchestra, and it was like how could the person who wrote these liner notes not get that this was the most important moment in this show, and maybe the most visible version of what creating is about. You know what I mean?  I don’t remember who did the liner notes, and I certainly don’t want to call them out on it, but I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe it, unless they just didn’t include because they wanted you to be surprised.

God, now you have to tell me what the moment is. 

I know. And if I start to tell you I’ll probably start crying.

At the end of the first act George is there and they all sort of walk into their places and they create the scene, during “Sunday.”

Yes.

So at the end of the second at, they’re singing the reprise of “Sunday” and they’re all walking in again, into their places. But instead of creating the painting…

<3 *begins crying*<3

…they all bow to the artist.

And this is the thing about creating art, at least for me. You never know whether what you’re doing is any good. And the art can’t tell you. So you have people or the public and whatnot who come at you with two different opinions. Some will love it some will hate it, some will be nice, some will be mean, for whatever reason.

That trust in yourself, that what you’re doing is actually good—you certainly hope it is, but the art can’t tell you whether it’s good or not. So this artist fantasy, ultimate fantasy, is when the art bows in deference to the artist.

Does that make sense? It’s like that piece of art saying ‘You did right by us. This is good. You’ve created something great.’

I dare you to watch this and not get misty-eyed yourself.

Would you say as an artist that it’s the art that you want to hear from more than anything else?

Well, I mean, you’ll never hear from the art, unless you create a moment like that. I don’t know.

No, you want the art to be good, you want to the art to be great, but you’re never going to know. You’re never going to know. It’s already subjective.  It’s always subjective. And the person who loves Sondheim hates Andrew Lloyd Webber and the person who loves Andrew Lloyd Webber hates Sondheim. What are you going to do ? We can say what we like, and we can judge things accordingly, and hurl accolades and awards, but at the end of the day, art measuring itself as art doesn’t really exist except in fantasy. So, I don’t know.

That’s what I have to say about that.

So years before you took a shift at Marie’s, you played there one night in a really unique set of circumstances, yes?

So I had played auditions for La Cage Aux Folles—some of them, there were a lot of us. And I and my partner at the time had been friendly with Fritz Holt and Barry Brown [the producers of the show]; they were just kind of friends. And Fritz called me after the show had been running for a while and said Hey, we have a lot of people who are not well in the cast and we’re trying to do things to help raise money. Three of the Cagelles [the dancers performing as drag queens who make up much of the cast of La Cage] want to maybe do a little tour of the piano bars and pass the hat. Would you help us?

So I went up in the afternoon, and each of them had a solo and they did something as a group. And to be honest, I can’t remember what the songs were at this point, which makes me kind of sad! But they were not from La Cage. They were just songs. I don’t even know that they were showtunes necessarily.

Then I went home, went back to the theater at about midnight, because the show went until 11, 11:30-ish? and then they had get out of all their La Cage stuff and then get into all of their own drag stuff that wasn’t from La Cage because you can’t wear things from the theater out. But they had new things to wear. So I picked them up and I could no longer tell who was who in that group. Now they were just transformed into these glittery seven foot creatures.

And so I helped them into the limo (which I’m assuming La Cage had rented), we rode down from the theater to the Village, and did Marie’s, did the Duplex, did Rose’s Turn, did Five Oaks, did Arthur’s, did Kettle of Fish or whatever it was called. I don’t know if Monster was there at that point? Maybe?

So yeah, we just went all around to all of the piano bars, probably 20, 25 places and finished around 2:30, 3 am in the morning, and then I went home.

Was it a big deal to you to be playing at Marie’s at that time?  

I was terrified, but not because it was Marie’s. I think I was terrified everywhere I went. I was never very sure about my piano skills; that’s just me. So I think I was just more nervous in general.

Years later, how did you end playing the piano at Marie’s?

Randy [Taylor, current manager of Marie’s] and I were in Company in 2003. That’s how we met and became friends. I don’t think he was working at Marie’s at the time.

But later, at some point after Andre and I had moved out of the city, Randy was down here. And I just play sometimes, and at some point he said, Hey, I’ve never asked you this, but would you ever be interested in filling in at Marie’s. And I said, I don’t know if I’d be good but yes, I would be interested.

At first, I was filling in really regularly because Jim Allen was ill. I did a lot of Thursdays and several Sunday earlys. And then when he died the whole schedule got shifted around, and Randy asked if I wanted Tuesdays, so that’s where I’ve been.

I had a few people who discovered me pretty early on, but I didn’t have a lot of people. I feel like I have more regulars now than I did pre-pandemic.

Do you think the Marie’s livestream during the pandemic helped?

I don’t know. There’s a part of me that would like to think so, just because we were streaming. You’d see how many people you’d have in that room, and in its heyday there were just a lot of people.

Like, how many?

Oh, hundreds. I want to say the first 2 or 3 times I streamed from home—New York had shut down, but people were still going to work, businesses hadn’t cut back yet or cut people’s salaries, so people were still making the same kind of money they had been making, they hadn’t really felt an impact from COVID yet—I think the first 3 shifts I made like 800 dollars a shift. There were a lot of tippers.

And then as you start to go this isn’t for a month or two months, this is for, Oh we don’t even know how long this is for, it slowed up. But it never stopped. I’m in my basement, in pajamas if I wanted to be, and people were generous. Whether that was $20 bucks or $200 bucks, it was money I wouldn’t have had otherwise.

How did the idea for Marie’s to do a livestream come about?

I don’t remember who had the idea that we would stream into the Marie’s Group [on Facebook]. The Marie’s Crisis Group at that time was very small.

Was that the group for regulars?

No, the Marie’s Regular Crisis was a group that we made after we started streaming into the other one, so that we could get back to that small group. Because the Marie’s Group was growing by tens of thousands a day.

Wow.

[Amongst the staff] It’d be like, I think we’re going to hit 30,000 in the next few hours, put in what time you think we’ll hit the 30,000 mark and whoever wins—well, we didn’t really get anything *laughs*, but it was sort of like that.

That Facebook livestream was how I first came to know Marie’s. As a result, I had no idea that in the real Marie’s it’s a group singalong.  

Really?

Yes. And knowing that now, I wonder, was it super hard to be up there by yourself singing and playing? Because that is not the job really.

Yeah, it was weird. I don’t consider myself a singer at all. I mean, I think I actually sing badly. I’m coming around to the fact that maybe I’m not horrible. The other night someone said I love your smile and your voice is so wonderful, and I was like, What?

Note: Jim actually has a fine voice and many people say so. Here he is, on Facebook Live, just a few weeks after the pandemic began.

Were there stages in how you felt doing the livestream? Like at first it felt one way, and then another and another?

At first, we were just trying to figure out what shifts were. Because they were shorter shifts. And then we were trying to figure out how the other staff members could also get tips. So at some point pretty early on it became everybody gets two two-hour or two-and-a-half hour shifts, and take a break for a singer to slot in a video.

And Randy was the one who came up with the schedule pretty much. And it wasn’t like you ever had to sub anyone in for you because you could do it from wherever you were, and nobody could really go anywhere, so…

I think I had Tuesdays and Fridays, maybe? 530-9:30 or 5-9:30. We were kind of playing with some of that, but for the most part everybody was onboard and happy to have an outlet to do something. And it was fun.

What was good about it for me was you’re kind of trying to pay attention to requests, but at the same time if someone was requesting something that wasn’t going to work [you could ignore it]. Because it’s just me, it’s not like anyone can help lead this. The 8-minute version of “Brotherhood of Man” is probably not going to happen, because I can’t sing it.

The other good thing, though, is with the keyboard, I could transpose it down with the step of a button if I needed to. That helped.

And if you ignored a song, no one would even necessarily know, right? It all gets lost in the endless Facebook feed.

Yeah, it’s just going by. After the shift, actually, I would go back through the feed, because I couldn’t really read it while it was happening, and sometimes I’d see requests from people or someone had come into the room that I didn’t know was there. And I tried to occasionally address that the next time, I’d say “Oh I went through  the feed and I had a request for this and I love that song so I’m going to do it now.” You catch up a little.

Pretty much every pianist will talk about how Marie’s is a gay bar, but I feel like you’re the one that’s probably most know for telling stories and talking about the history of the place. Where did you get all that information you have?

A lot of my understanding of the history of Marie’s actually comes mostly from a bartender that was working on a film that was going to be a history of Marie’s. He left during COVID and didn’t return. His name is Michael Vecchio.

So I got a lot of it from him, and then I’ve read some other things. [Bartender] Doug Thompson has told me some things. Other people, too.  

And some of what I say, it’s got to be a little bit approximate. I find I have to just figure out what makes sense for me. For instance, it’s actually really unclear, when Marie DuMont opened the bar, did she open it as Marie’s or as Marie’s Crisis? I believe she opened it as Marie’s, and it became known underground as Marie’s Crisis. That just makes more sense to me than saying I’m going to open this and because I hate that other woman down the street named Marie, so I’m going to call it Marie’s Crisis.

Wikipedia says much the same. It was originally Marie’s, later renamed to Marie’s Crisis, supposedly because Thomas Paine, author of The American Crisis, a collection of articles he wrote during the American Revolutionary War to help argue for independence—including most famously “Common Sense”, had lived in that location and died there.

It is a super weird name for a bar.

It is, right? I’ve also started saying that the WPA artists that have done that mural in the back, they clearly thought the name was about the French Revolution. But I don’t think there’s anything about it that’s the French Revolution.

I like the exploration of all that. People tell you things. Like the whole secret passageway to Christopher Street, Michael said we’d have to break through a wall to see if it’s true, but supposedly?

Wait, there was a secret passageway? Where?

In the back corner next to the bar where people sit, that wall was supposedly a hidden doorway that would take you to Christopher Street.

Was it there to escape cops?

Yeah, I’m sure that Marie’s like all gay bars was being regularly raided. 

Why do you tell those stories during your shift?  

It’s the lore of the place. I think it’s fascinating for people to know where they are, and to have that history. I feel like that bar is so full of history. And all of that stuff I talk about regarding standing on the shoulders of those who came before us, I really believe that strongly.

One Pride Sunday someone in the bar said something about don’t spend money on these corporations that just put a rainbow flag on things for Pride, go to the small shops…. And I kind of disagree. Twenty years ago you would be begging those people to acknowledge your existence. So now if you want to spit in their faces because they have acknowledged your existence, Okay, that’s on you, but you’re a kid. You don’t get how difficult and hard-fought getting Absolut to put a fucking gay flag on their vodka was, you know? You just see it as them making money off of gays. Well, okay.

There are plenty of places that aren’t putting gay flags on things. So boycott them, don’t boot the ones that are putting a flag on it. Because you were invisible to them 20 years ago.

So I feel really strongly that we needed to acknowledge this whole journey. And that journey begins with the place being opened up as a gay brothel, and then a gay bar.

According to Wikipedia—again, grain of salt here—long before Marie DuMont that location was a brothel and boarding house, then became a gay bar, which in the language of the day was known as a “boy bar.”

I mean, Julius’ is the oldest gay bar in the city, but Julius’ didn’t open as a gay bar. It was where Walter Winchell hung out, it was a straight sports racing bar. You look at the pictures on the wall, it was a straight bar before it was a gay bar.

Marie’s was always gay. Not necessarily with propriety. *laughs*

But it was always gay. And I don’t care if it’s filled with straight people, it’s oozing gay showtunes from its walls.

Probably all of the staff could bring their own unique perspectives to the history of Marie’s.

It’s interesting, when I’ve heard you tell stories about the queer history of the bar, I’ve usually thought you’re doing that for the straight folks who are there. But it sounds like you’re also providing it for other gay people who don’t necessarily have the historical experience.

Especially for young gays. If I can make two young gay people go Oh, this is a holy bastion of gayness or for a second someone goes, Oh a lot of people died in the 80s and we are the poorer because of that, [I’m satisfied]. Although I try to make sure I don’t get maudlin about it, either.

Either in terms of when you stop to tell a story or a joke, or in your overall song selection, do you have strategies or tactics at work? Like you take a moment to talk to the crowd because you feel like they’re not engaged, or you need to slow them down a bit?

Sometimes, absolutely. When it comes to laying out the evening, I know that I’m going to start with some obscure stuff that hopefully I can get people’s ear to actually tune into, it’s not something they know so they can’t just discount it.

And I know I’m probably going to end the way I now end, which usually involves some mix of Little Shop, Les Mis, Wicked and “Over the Rainbow.” But I also know to get to “Over the Rainbow,” I have to lay in some of the history stuff, especially with my brother, earlier, otherwise that choice is completely out of context. There’s no thread.

I like to make connections so that everything ultimately makes sense in the end. And even if it hasn’t been the same people in the room and some of them  have only heard the beginning of the thread, it ends up being important for me to make sure I’m completing a narrative. And if someone has been there, they’re getting the whole story.

So you feel like over the course of an evening one of the things you’re doing is telling a story.

Yeah. I think so. It’s not always the same, and it doesn’t always have the same elements.

I’m hoping over time I’ll interview other people to talk about their experiences working or going to Marie’s. And so I want to end with two questions that I’ve been thinking of asking everybody.

First, what’s your favorite Marie’s inside joke?

There’s one from the old days that no one uses any more (probably with good reason). In the song “How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria,” because back then everyone knew what a wave was—

What’s a Wave?

It was a woman who worked in the Navy. WAVES were the navy and WACS were the Army. So you get to the line “How do you keep a wave upon the sand?”, and the room response was “A dike!”

*groaning in the background at Jim’s house from others listening*

Yeah. No one says that any more.

Go figure. Modern day?

I think my favorite is the echo part in “What I Did For Love”…“Kiss today goodbye, and point me toward tomorrow”, and the room response is “It’s over by the bathroom!”

Any idea where that comes from? Because I am 100% obsessed with that.

No idea. It’s sort of like the chant they do in “Circle of Life” from Lion King. No can do the chanting, so they change it to “Pink pajamas penguins on the bottom…Pink pajamas penguins on the bottom.”

It really works, right?

Last question: Why do you keep working at Marie’s?

Well that’s just fun, isn’t it? I don’t know. I think it’s fun. I’m never driving to Marie’s going Ugh, I have to go to Marie’s the way I have with some other jobs. Or Ugh, this is going to be a horrible night. I mean, sometimes I don’t have great nights there moneywise or mood-wise or crowd-wise. But it’s really simple for me. It’s not work. So if I end up getting a little money for something that isn’t really work, it’s kind of like, well that was good.

I’ve also played the piano my whole life for people without getting paid… *Laughs* So for someone to give me a little money is really sweet.

Truthfully when I first used to go to Marie’s,  I thought this would be like a dream to play here, but I knew I didn’t have the faculty to play there because I needed music in front of me. Even when I write music, I can’t play you anything I’ve written without music in front of me because the process of writing and the process of playing, performing to me are completely separate things.

So thank you to Steve Jobs at Apple for creating an iPad that’s large enough for my aging eyes to read music off of, and has enough memory, and to whoever created PDFs, they should get a lot of credit, because this is it for me. And the music program I use, it really is simple to work with.

I don’t know. That’s what I got.

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Jim Merillat, everybody!!

Thank you, Jim! And thanks to you for reading. I hope you’ve enjoyed it.

I’ll be back Monday with the Wow. Have a great weekend!