It is more than likely that Jonathan Groff, the star of the new Broadway show Just in Time, has more name recognition in today’s New York than Bobby Darin, the midcentury singer whom he plays in this jukebox bio-musical, of sorts. Darin’s relative lack of contemporary reputation compared with, say, the Temptations, is why Just in Time, written by Warren Leight and Isaac Oliver from a concept by Ted Chapin, situates its narrative of a life lived in the fast lane behind a very porous fourth wall, the easier to explain who Sandra Dee is. It’s why Groff, smartly dressed and toting a retro microphone, greets the audience at Manhattan’s Circle in the Square Theatre not as Darin, the baby-faced playboy crooner, but as Groff, Broadway king fresh off his Tony win, poised to deliver a night of rousing, enthusiastic theater befitting a consummate showman.
The Tony win goes unmentioned, though Groff’s intro mirrors his moving acceptance speech: as a kid growing up in Pennsylvania, all he wanted to do was entertain. Sing and dance and bring joy. Groff explicitly compares himself to Darin (and, in one of the show’s many winking bits, acknowledges that yes, he will spit and sweat a lot while recounting the life story of the man whose first hit was Splish Splash). The melding of personas successfully transmutes Groff’s exceptional charisma and earned goodwill into the tale of a past celebrity most of the audience could not identify via photo. But it also makes suspension of disbelief an impossible hurdle; it is difficult with such an emphasis on the performer’s magnetism, to invest in the details of the subject’s actual life, which are occasionally tossed off like Wikipedia entries.
That Darin, born Walden Robert Cassotto in East Harlem, was a talent of trailblazing versatility who took on pop, rock’n’roll, swing, country and folk – a precursor to the modern pop star demands of reinvention – is not so much celebrated as sublimated into a show that leans heavily on knowingly dated pop-rock sounds and Darin’s most consistent form as a nightclub act. The sultry Copacabana-themed set, designed by Derek McLane, channels Darin’s greatest joy in life: connecting with audiences in a nightclub, riffing and rizzing on the specific chemistry with a specific audience, including certain lucky people pulled up by Groff to dance amid tables in the round.
Director Alex Timbers and choreographer Shannon Lewis make the most of the Circle in the Square’s opportunities for audience immersion. Groff, as himself and as Darin, and his three nightclub “sirens” (Valeria Yamin, Christine Cornish and Julia Grondin) saunter into aisles allowing some to feel the white-hot charge of the spotlight. A delightfully perky swing band plays on stage throughout and joins in on some bits; various characters from Darin’s short life – Groff tells you early that he died at 37, owing to a weak heart from childhood bouts with rheumatic fever – pop up on and around stages at opposite ends of the space.
Those characters are accoutrements to a show predicated on pizzazz, not friction or substance, though each woman gets her time to shine. This includes Darin’s mother, Polly (Michele Pawk), a former vaudeville singer reverent of the classics who pushed her son to pursue a showbiz career; much-older, too-doting sister Nina (Emily Bergl); first flame Connie Francis (Gracie Lawrence), a fellow 50s chart-chaser possessing a truly showstopping belt; and in the second act, the actor Sandra Dee (a mellifluously voiced Erika Henningsen), with whom Darin briefly became a Hollywood it-couple in the early 60s, before the marriage fell apart.
That Groff and Henningsen sell the rise and fall of this doomed pairing as well as they do within three songs is a testament to the sheer force of their performances; at one point I thought Groff had to have a double, so fast did he move between stages. But while the second act evinces some thornier parts of a character the first act kept mostly eager, ambitious and prodigiously imitative – Darin was a classically bad husband – it still zooms awkwardly through heavy material. At one point, Dee breezes through Darin’s pivot to politics, witnessing the assassination of RFK, mental breakdown, loss of his fortune, folk rebrand and decampment to Big Sur all in about 30 seconds. Likewise, the death he always knew was coming early passes too swiftly to fully land; much more emotional, if a touch too earnest for my liking, is Groff’s conclusion, as himself, celebrating the cliched yet still somehow underappreciated, unrepeatable magic of live performance.
Which is, ultimately, Just in Time’s selling point. The show puts an interesting twist on the cliche of a past-his-prime singer becoming a nightclub nostalgia act – typically a sad, pitiable fate for a pop star instead presented as a victory, a return to form and homecoming worthy of one of the show’s most vivacious numbers. Both Darin and Groff understood the implicit contract of a performer: lend one’s time in exchange for entertainment. The retro style of show will appeal to some Broadway-heads more than others, but on that promise, at least, Groff more than delivers.
