Lea Michele & Darren Criss Reunite Backstage at ‘Funny Girl’ on Broadway

As foreshadowed on Glee not so long ago, Lea Michele shined on a Broadway stage playing Barbra Streisand’s famous character Fanny Brice — and Darren Criss was there in the audience to cheer her on. The two former castmates had a mini McKinley High reunion backstage at the Funny Girl revival in New York City, as revealed Wednesday (Oct. 5) in a sweet photo shared on Michele’s Instagram after that night’s show.

In the photo, Michele — looking glamorous in a black blazer and gold hoop earrings — stands in front of a black stage curtain with one arm wrapped lovingly around Criss and the other around his wife, filmmaker Mia Swier. “The amount of times this guy has heard me sing Don’t Rain On My Parade,” she joked in her caption. “I love you.”

Indeed, the actress not only sings “Don’t Rain On My Parade” every night in Broadway’s Funny Girl revival — in which she’s starred since taking over the role of Fanny from Beanie Feldstein in September — but it was also her character Rachel Berry’s signature song on Glee.

One of the key plot points in the TV show (which wrapped in 2015, seven years before the following scenario happened in real life) involved Rachel landing the role of Fanny in a fictional Funny Girl revival on Broadway. Some of her old schoolmates, including Criss’ Blaine Anderson, come to see her on her opening night, as does Coach Sue Sylvester, played by Jane Lynch — who was also in the real life Funny Girl revival cast, but stepped away from the show just before Michele joined.

Based on the Scream Queens alum’s Instagram post, it seems that life really does imitate art. Criss isn’t the only one of her past Glee collaborators to have attended the show, though. Both Jonathan Groff and Glee creator Ryan Murphy were in the crowd at the Michele’s opening night, where she received not one, not two, but four standing ovations, according to Deadline.

See Lea Michele pose with Darren Criss backstage at Broadway’s Funny Girl below:

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