The newest star of Glee on his musical theater past, newfound fame and playing a positive gay character.
by Mark Lowry


It would be easy to say that musical theater fans have made Glee a hit TV show, but then again, all the high school football fanatics out there—and that crowd's a lot bigger than the musical one—couldn't make the acclaimed Friday Night Lights a hit. Glee certainly has its rabid followers and huge ratings, and a role on it could lead to The Big Time.

Just ask Matthew Morrison and Lea Michele, both of whom were Broadway names before the FOX TV show put them on magazine covers and red carpets and, for Michele, singing America the Beautiful at Super Bowl XLV.

Darren Criss seems destined for that path, too. The San Francisco performer had done some musical theater in high school and college (he auditioned for Glee with a Rodgers and Hart song), collaborated with a theatrical troupe called Team Starkid at the University of Michigan, and released a solo EP, Human.

But with his first appearance on Glee, as a gay student at the new boys school that Kurt (Golden Globe-winner Chris Colfer) attends, Criss' career took off. It helped that the energetic version of Katy Perry's "Teenage Dream," sung by Blaine and the Dalton Academy Warblers, was one of the best performances in the show's history.

Criss has already been confirmed as a series regular for the rest of season two and season three. He was recently in Fort Worth, Texas, to add star power to the auditions for The Glee Project, a new reality show on Oxygen. The show, a competition in which 12 young actors compete for a guest role on Glee, will air in June. (Here are some photos we shot that day, and here is Mark Lowry's story in the Star-Telegram, and another in the Dallas Voice.)

TheaterJones snagged a few minutes with Criss. In the video interviews below, he talks about his flirations with musical theater, dealing with newfound fame, and the importance of playing a positive gay character on a show with a large percentage of LGBT youth viewers. He also addresses the question of where the Kurt/Blaine storyline is going.

And we posted it just in time, as Glee returns with a new episode following tonight's Super Bowl. There's another new episode on Tuesday, Feb. 8.