Is there a more endearing Broadway star at the moment than Jonathan Groff? The veteran performer, who won the Tony Award last year for softening the very rough edges of the first-class jerk that is Franklin Shepard in Stephen Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along, has earned a reputation for likeability that carries throughout his new vehicle: Just in Time, a by-the-numbers biomusical about another hard-working performer, Bobby Darin, who rocketed to fame in the 1950s and ’60s as the singer (and often songwriter) of early rock-era hits like “Splish Splash” and “Dream Lover.”
Groff is a natural showman, comfortable in the spotlight whether he’s bantering with the audience (including those seated at cafe tables in the center of the Circle in the Square) or belting high notes with his crystalline tenor or throwing himself into energetic dance sequences (choreographed by Shannon Lewis). The show leans into its Groffness by introducing not Darin but the star as himself, delivering a talky introduction about what drew him to the project we’re about to see. The actor, still boyish at 40, recalls how he heard early Darin hits “while twirling in our mother’s heels in Pennsylvania Amish country” and how he too wanted to grow up to sing and dance on stage and build a connection with an audience. “It was the only relationship he was any good at,” he says of Darin, before adding in a confessional aside, “Honestly? Same.” He also comments on his own much-memed penchant for sweating and spitting on stage (“I’m just generally extremely wet when I do this, and I’m sorry in advance”) — an added connection to the man whose first big hit was about the joys of bath-taking.
Despite Groff’s early description of Darin as a “playboy crooner,” the show depicts the Rock & Roll Hall of Famer as more as a serial monogamist with two great (and A-list) loves in his life. First there was Connie Francis (Gracie Lawrence), the “Who’s Sorry Now?” hitmaker for whom he wrote several bubblegum-pop tunes while both were still in their teens. (She later said she regretted turning down his marriage proposal, which she apparently did at the insistence of her gun-toting, strict Italian immigrant father.) Then there was Sandra Dee (Erika Henningsen), the former child actress whom he met on the set of his first movie in 1960 — leading to a rocky marriage as she became a glorified roadie, with their only child in tow, on his never-ending concert tours. (The show skips Darin’s second wife, a former legal secretary whom he divorced just weeks before his death in 1973, at age 37.)
Lawrence and Henningsen are sensational singers, belting out their respective stars’ signature tunes with real depth and power. And the rest of the cast, often doubling and tripling up in small roles, smoothly guide us through the beats of the story — aided by multiple costume changes (designs by Catherine Zuber), subtle shifts in Derek McLane’s classic-nightclub set design, and colorful lighting (by Justin Townsend) that follows the performers wherever they happen to move about the two stage platforms and passageways running through the cafe-style seating in between. Director Alex Timbers treats the whole theater as an updated version of the Copacabana that became a fixation of Darin since his boyhood days in a working-class neighborhood in post-war East Harlem.
But the show repeatedly begs the question: Do we really need another Broadway biomusical of a chart-topping artist from half a century ago? Darin had a number of big hits, including covers of older tunes like “Mack the Knife” and “Beyond the Sea” that became improbable chart favorites with Darin’s savvy change in tempo and pop vocalizing. And yet Darin was not a major musical innovator and his song catalog (which we learn he lost late in his life in an investment deal that went sour) is bathwater-deep — a shortcoming that becomes even more glaring with the inevitable medley that ends the show.
Aside from that fourth-wall-busting opening, Warren Leight and Isaac Oliver’s script (based on a concept by Ted Chapin) breaks no new ground in telling the story of an early pop idol whose fondness for night clubs and cabaret acts made him a Sinatra-style throwback even in his prime. It’s not that Darin led a boring life, but the script continually underplays details that might have given the drama more heft. We learn only in passing about his political ambitions and association with Robert F. Kennedy (he was present at L.A.’s Ambassador Hotel when the Democratic presidential front-runner was assassinated in 1968). More puzzling is an almost offhand revelation about the tight-knit family that raised him, which included a former vaudevillian mom (Michele Pawk) and a mother-hen older sister (Emily Bergl) who fusses over the health issues he faced as a survivor of multiple bouts of rheumatic fever that weakened his heart (and led to his early death).
While it’s hard to resist Groff’s considerable charms, he struggles to sell us on Darin’s cockiness or the callous way he dumps Sandra Dee (which he does here without obvious venom or even a mistress-in-waiting). You don’t cast Groff for his dark side; he’s an actor who thrives in the spotlight, not the shade. And you can’t help admiring the way he glistens delivering another high kick or flip into his head voice for a deliciously sustained high note. Beyond the C indeed. ★★★☆☆
JUST IN TIME
Circle in the Square, Broadway
Running time: 2 hours, 25 minutes (with 1 intermission)
Tickets on sale through July 27 for $99 to $499
Culture Sauce 