The place smells like cat pee and disinfectant, if I’m honest. It’s in a deep, dark basement so there is very little natural ventilation there. It’s old – old enough that you believe them when they tell you it’s been an operational tavern since the 1800s. There isn’t much by the way of signage, so you have to know it’s there, nestled between a Korean BBQ joint and an ice cream parlour devoted to the TV show The Golden Girls. I have to crouch low to get through the doorway on the last step so I can enter the bar itself. It looks small, but I’ve seen over 200 people cramped into this place, strangers smiling and singing. The low roof is lined with weathered, sturdy beams dotted with twirling Christmas lights and to the left is a standing piano with some stools around it. At the far back is the actual bar, set against a mural painted on a mirror with the French words “Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite” floating above a scene of ethnically vague figures waving a flag. The mural, I’m told later, is based on Thomas Payne’s essay The Rights of Man, mainly because he apparently keeled over dead at this very place! There are worse place to kick it.
I discovered the bar Marie’s Crisis by chance on a day while I was in New York’s West Village. I was walking along when I heard the most joyful rendition of the “Do Re Mi” from The Sound of Music wafting through two slits of basement windows. Bitter experience has taught me that that Julie Andrews songs are not as well received in public basements as one would hope, so I ducked inside expecting to find a rehearsal. Instead I found a magical haven: it has no speakers, no dance tracks, no cocktail list or food, no fancy decor or strict dress code. All it has is a pianist, a piano and the rule that every song has to be from a musical. By 8 pm this place is so packed that its entry line goes around the block and everyone – and I mean everyone – is facing the piano and singing at their loudest. It doesn’t matter if, like me, you can’t carry a tune to save your life. There are enough Broadway-level singers in the crowd to harmonize for everyone. Most of them are actually likely to be working on Broadway themselves!
It’s a very strange little community, the musical theatre crowd. Because the emphasis at the Crisis is on singing and not awkward small talk, I’ve found that I’ve met some wonderful people there over the years simply by singing Evita without tune or embarrassment. Actors, choreographers, photographers, singers, yes. But also physicists, book agents, auctioneers and, on one memorable occasion, a working foot model! Not all of them love musicals but they all loved the warm, welcoming atmosphere that singing musicals together can conjure.
I often think of peoples’ love for musicals sort of like the love of drawing – in that everyone does it as a child, but it’s drilled out of us the older we get. We are all shown Disney movies and movie musicals growing up, but their value is confined to the nursery. It’s fine to be in plays when you are six or seven; anxious parents crouch eagerly in the aisles of school auditoriums, waiting with their camera to catch their kid’s one triumphant line. But the same people will think of plays as a waste of time once the child is 15 or 16. “It’s no longer time to play dress up”, I remember one parent at school saying to a kid. That’s BS, frankly. At 14, I learned more about the intricacies of the text of Romeo and Juliet by watching West Side Story than I could grasp while reading the text. I’d watch Gigi every month as a kid, which is totally fine because it isn’t until you’re older that you realize that Gigi comes from a whole family of high-end French escorts. Fiddler on the Roof taught me more about desi family dynamics than I care to admit, as well as the pre-revolutionary Russian pogroms that forced Jews to flee decades before the world wars. Hello Dolly introduced me to Barbra Streisand, millenary, Gene Kelley, the Oscars, and eventually Carol Channing; Can Can introduced me to Frank Sinatra, and all of Cole Porter’s song list. Indeed, A Chorus Line, a meta-musical about a group of dancers auditioning to be in a musical, taught me about so much - artistic creation, collaboration, the value of training, the inevitability of unforeseen circumstances, plastic surgery, coming out, breaking up, moving on – that there isn’t a week that goes by that a song from there doesn’t form the soundtrack to my life. (To be fair, “God I hope I get it” should be in the songbook of all of our lives).
Some of you may know some of these references, most of you probably don’t. That’s OK. I don’t actually know anything about Metallica or post-2010 Bollywood, and I’m very OK with that. But the reason I love the Crisis is the same reason I am unashamed in my love for musicals, or for that matter any kind of art. Because you’re never too old to play dress up! Everyone at the Crisis knows this: that there you can shout out the lyrics to So Long, Farewell with abandon and the next minute lock arms with a complete stranger sitting on the stool next to you while you both go in for a teary rendition of Memories. There you feel the way musicals often make us feel. There you feel safe.
Write to thekantawala@gmail.com
I discovered the bar Marie’s Crisis by chance on a day while I was in New York’s West Village. I was walking along when I heard the most joyful rendition of the “Do Re Mi” from The Sound of Music wafting through two slits of basement windows. Bitter experience has taught me that that Julie Andrews songs are not as well received in public basements as one would hope, so I ducked inside expecting to find a rehearsal. Instead I found a magical haven: it has no speakers, no dance tracks, no cocktail list or food, no fancy decor or strict dress code. All it has is a pianist, a piano and the rule that every song has to be from a musical. By 8 pm this place is so packed that its entry line goes around the block and everyone – and I mean everyone – is facing the piano and singing at their loudest. It doesn’t matter if, like me, you can’t carry a tune to save your life. There are enough Broadway-level singers in the crowd to harmonize for everyone. Most of them are actually likely to be working on Broadway themselves!
There you can shout out the lyrics to So Long, Farewell with abandon and the next minute lock arms with a complete stranger sitting on the stool next to you while you both go in for a teary rendition of Memories
It’s a very strange little community, the musical theatre crowd. Because the emphasis at the Crisis is on singing and not awkward small talk, I’ve found that I’ve met some wonderful people there over the years simply by singing Evita without tune or embarrassment. Actors, choreographers, photographers, singers, yes. But also physicists, book agents, auctioneers and, on one memorable occasion, a working foot model! Not all of them love musicals but they all loved the warm, welcoming atmosphere that singing musicals together can conjure.
I often think of peoples’ love for musicals sort of like the love of drawing – in that everyone does it as a child, but it’s drilled out of us the older we get. We are all shown Disney movies and movie musicals growing up, but their value is confined to the nursery. It’s fine to be in plays when you are six or seven; anxious parents crouch eagerly in the aisles of school auditoriums, waiting with their camera to catch their kid’s one triumphant line. But the same people will think of plays as a waste of time once the child is 15 or 16. “It’s no longer time to play dress up”, I remember one parent at school saying to a kid. That’s BS, frankly. At 14, I learned more about the intricacies of the text of Romeo and Juliet by watching West Side Story than I could grasp while reading the text. I’d watch Gigi every month as a kid, which is totally fine because it isn’t until you’re older that you realize that Gigi comes from a whole family of high-end French escorts. Fiddler on the Roof taught me more about desi family dynamics than I care to admit, as well as the pre-revolutionary Russian pogroms that forced Jews to flee decades before the world wars. Hello Dolly introduced me to Barbra Streisand, millenary, Gene Kelley, the Oscars, and eventually Carol Channing; Can Can introduced me to Frank Sinatra, and all of Cole Porter’s song list. Indeed, A Chorus Line, a meta-musical about a group of dancers auditioning to be in a musical, taught me about so much - artistic creation, collaboration, the value of training, the inevitability of unforeseen circumstances, plastic surgery, coming out, breaking up, moving on – that there isn’t a week that goes by that a song from there doesn’t form the soundtrack to my life. (To be fair, “God I hope I get it” should be in the songbook of all of our lives).
Some of you may know some of these references, most of you probably don’t. That’s OK. I don’t actually know anything about Metallica or post-2010 Bollywood, and I’m very OK with that. But the reason I love the Crisis is the same reason I am unashamed in my love for musicals, or for that matter any kind of art. Because you’re never too old to play dress up! Everyone at the Crisis knows this: that there you can shout out the lyrics to So Long, Farewell with abandon and the next minute lock arms with a complete stranger sitting on the stool next to you while you both go in for a teary rendition of Memories. There you feel the way musicals often make us feel. There you feel safe.
Write to thekantawala@gmail.com