Review: Jonathan Groff's Passion Fires Up the Bobby Darin Musical Just in Time

“Ladies and gentlemen…Jonathan Groff!” In the context of the bio-musical subgenre, this opening line of the new Bobby Darin musical Just in Time feels subversive. Instead of immediately presenting us with its star as Darin, book writers Warren Leight and Isaac Oliver have Groff introduce himself as our emcee, who will eventually play Darin after he serenades us with a couple of the crooner’s hits. It’s a startling opening salvo for a surprisingly entertaining show.

It helps that Darin sports a genuinely interesting life story. On the surface, his life looks like a standard rise-and-fall tragedy, with a failed relationship, a failed marriage, a professional flameout as meteoric as his ascent, and persistent heart problems leading him to live for only 37 years. Those heart problems, though, hint at what distinguishes his biography. Because of multiple bouts with rheumatic fever as a kid, he wasn’t even expected to live past age 16. Perhaps that specter of death constantly hanging over his head is what led him to reinvent himself as often as he did as an artist: from songwriter to singer to movie star, from pop idol to politically engaged folk artist.

All his hits are here: original tunes like “Splish Splash,” “Dream Lover,” and “18 Yellow Roses,” plus his famous covers of “Mack the Knife,” “Beyond the Sea,” and “If I Were a Carpenter.” And the show breezes through the highs and lows of his personal life: his upbringing under vaudeville-singer grandmother Polly Walden (Michele Pawk), who he initially thought was his mother; his romance with Connie Francis (Gracie Lawrence), which ends when she buckles under her father’s pressure and breaks it off; to his marriage to and eventual divorce from Sandra Dee (Erika Henningsen); to the discovery that Nina (Emily Bergl), who he thought was his sister, was in fact his birth mother. (Caesar Samayoa, Lance Roberts, and Joe Barbara play other real-life and fictional figures; Valeria Yamin, Christine Cornish, and Julia Grondin round out the cast as a trio of Sirens.)

Just in Time will be informative for those unfamiliar with Darin’s life and work going in. With access to Wikipedia and a subscription to a music streaming service, though, one could get a similar education at a much lower price. And of course, those who are already Darin fans will likely know much of what happens. It’d be easy to dismiss the show sight unseen as yet another money grab stoking the ever-lucrative nostalgia impulse. In this case, however, it’s amazing what pure showmanship and a modicum of imagination can accomplish in keeping one’s cynicism at bay.

Some of that imagination lies in the writing. Especially clever is Leight and Oliver’s use of asides, in which characters snap their fingers and freeze the actors so they can explain a point to the audience. Usually Darin does this…until, in the second act, Sandra Dee gets in on the act, offering her own perspective on their relationship to counteract Darin’s narrative. At one point Darin snaps into an aside just because he wants to savor an emotional moment. Such grace notes throughout the book give the show a loose, irreverent feel that Alex Timbers furthers in his direction.

Scenic designer Derek McLane has turned Circle in the Square Theatre into a nightclub, the usual raised platform at the center of its in-the-round auditorium replaced with tables around which actors often navigate (Shannon Lewis is the show’s choreographer). Justin Townsend adds to the glitzy ambience with his wide-ranging lighting design, highlighting the intimacy of personal moments as evocatively as he reinforces the glamour of the larger numbers. Under Catherine Zuber’s costume design, the material in some of Groff’s suits practically gleams.

Peter Hylenski’s immaculate sound design allows us to savor both the vocals and the textures of Andrew Resnick and Michael Thurber’s big-band orchestrations. And the vocals are certainly glorious, as is the acting all-around. Lawrence makes an impressive Broadway musical debut as Connie Francis; both she and Henningsen display inner strength even as they melt under Darin’s charm and braggadocio. And Pawk and Bergl radiate warmth and concern as the two major maternal figures in his life.

Naturally, though, it’s Groff’s energy and charisma that anchor Just in Time. The brilliance of the show’s opening is that, by creating a staged-concert atmosphere from the start, it frees us from the need to compare him to Darin and instead foregrounds Groff’s own passion for telling his story. Groff even concludes the evening with an unexpectedly eloquent tribute to the evanescent yet transcendent power of theater. How rare it is for a jukebox bio-musical to feel like it comes genuinely from the heart.