Bobby Darin Did It All And, In ‘Just In Time, So Does Jonathan Groff

This June, Jonathan Groff will have the rare chance to win Tony Awards in two consecutive years. If he repeats last year’s triumph for Merrily We Roll Along with one for this year’s Just In Time, he’ll join a very exclusive club of six Broadway greats: Laurie Metcalf (2017, 2018), Judith Light (2012, 2013), Stephen Spinella (1993, 1994), Sandy Dennis (1963, 1964), Gwen Verdon (1958, 1959), and Shirley Booth (1949, 1950).

For Groff, the two-in-a-row possibility, exciting enough, even has a hint more frisson: Just In Time, a biographical musical of Bobby Darin, marks a career first for the busy actor. “I’ve never been part of a project from its conception. Eight years ago this month, actually, Ted Chapin asked me to do a night of Bobby Darin music at the 92nd Street Y and I read this book called Dream Lovers: The Magnificent Shattered Lives of Bobby Darin and Sandra Dee, written by Dodd Darin, the son of Bobby and Sandy, to get ready for the concert. And there was this quote at the end about how Bobby Darin was a ‘nightclub animal’ and I just started to feel like we could tell the story of his life in the context of a nightclub act.”

When he walked into Broadway’s Circle In The Square theater earlier this year and saw the famously in-the-round venue gloriously transformed into the classic Copacabana nightclub of Darin’s era, he burst into tears. “I couldn’t believe that this thing, this dream that we had had for so many years was actually coming to fruition.”

Groff was only 21 when he landed the Broadway role that would make him a star – Melchior in Spring Awakening – and since then has appeared in Hamilton (as King George, 2015), last season’s Merrily We Roll Along opposite Daniel Radcliffe and Lindsay Mendez and now Just In Time. Each performance won over the critics, built a large base of devoted fans and, yes, included lots of spit, but more about that in a bit.

In Darin, who died in 1973 at just 37 after a lifetime of health problems, Groff has landed less on a role than a showcase. Darin was one of show business’ ultimate shape-shifters who went from early rock-and-roller (“Splish Splash”), heartthrob crooner (“Dream Lover”), Sinatra-like swinger (“Mack The Knife”) and Dylan-esque folkie (“If I Were A Carpenter”) before finally settling back into the “nightclub animal” he was meant to be.

RELATED: ‘Just In Time’ Broadway Review: Jonathan Groff Plays Bobby Darin – And Two Stars Ignite

Even Groff’s longtime fans might be surprised at the versatility he displays on that recreated Copa set (and its table tops). Without doing a straight-up impersonation of Darin, Groff nails every song style and dance craze.

This year, Groff is nominated in the Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role/Musical, where his fellow nominees will be Darren Criss, Maybe Happy Ending; Andrew Durand, Dead Outlaw; Tom Francis, Sunset Blvd.; James Monroe Iglehart, A Wonderful World: The Louis Armstrong Musical; and Jeremy Jordan, Floyd Collins.

And for the Tony record, four other nominees this year could pull off the two-in-a-row thing: Actress Kara Young (last year’s Purlie Victorious, this year’s Purpose); director Danya Taymor (The Outsiders/John Proctor Is the Villain), playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins (Appropriate/Purpose); and choreographer Justin Peck (Illinoise/Buena Vista Social Club).

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Just In Time, directed by Alex Timbers with a book by Warren Leight and Isaac Oliver and music made famous by Darin, is playing at Broadway’s Circle In The Square. In addition to Groff, the cast includes The Sex Lives of College Girls star Gracie Lawrence, The Four Seasons star Erika Henningsen, Michele Pawk, Joe Barbara, Emily Bergl, Lance Roberts, Caesar Samayoa, Christine Cornish, Julia Grondin, Valeria Yamin, John Treacy Egan, Tari Kelly, Matt Magnusson, Khori Michelle Petinaud and Larkin Reilly.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.

DEADLINE: I think it’s been almost a year to the day that we spoke about your Tony nomination for Merrily. Now here we are for Just In Time. Should we go for the triple crown and just plan on talking next year about your third nomination?

GROFF: I fucking would, but maybe I’ll still be doing the Bobby Darin show because I’m not ready to leave anytime soon.

DEADLINE: Does getting nominated for one show feel somehow different than for another show? Just in Time, say, compared to Merrily?

GROFF: I’ve never been a part of something from the conception before, part of a project from its conception. Eight years ago this month, actually, Ted Chapin asked me to do a night of Bobby Darin music at the 92nd Street Y and I read this book called Dream Lovers: The Magnificent Shattered Lives of Bobby Darin and Sandra Dee, written by Dodd Darin the son of Bobby and Sandy, to get ready for the concert. And there was this quote at the end about how Bobby Darin was a “nightclub animal” and I just started to feel like we could tell the story of his life in the context of a nightclub act.

And Alex Timbers came onboard to direct that concert and we’ve been developing this idea together ever since then. And so, eight years later to be doing this show on Broadway, like, when I walked into the Circle in the Square theater on the first day of takes, I burst into tears because I just, I couldn’t believe that this thing, this dream that we had had for so many years, was actually coming to fruition. So, in that way for every other job I’ve ever done, I’ve been an actor for hire and this, this is different.

DEADLINE: Circle in the Square, which has been transformed into the Copacabana nightclub, has never looked better. I think the in-the-round structure can be problematic for some shows.

GROFF: It’s funny. There’s this record called Darin at the Copa and we would carry it around. Like I gave it as a gift to our producers that we were trying to get to join us on the project, and when we were interviewing writers we had this record there. And when you look at the cover of this record, it’s Bobby Darin standing there with his kind of, like, iconic bent wrist, singing in this gray suit, and he’s surrounded at the Copa by these tables where people could literally reach out and touch him or vice versa.

And right behind him is the bandstand with the big band there behind him, and that record, the cover of that record has been the inspo, like the energetic inspo for the project from the very beginning. And Circle in the Square, first of all, when it was down in the Village, in Greenwich Village before it moved uptown to 50th Street, it was a nightclub first. Circle in the Square as an entity was first a nightclub before it became a theater, and so there’s this energy about that space, and the history of that theater. And then just the logistics of how that theater sits, it just feels exactly like the cover of that record.

So, there couldn’t be a more perfect marriage of show and theater. And Alex Timbers, when we did our March workshop of the show last year, said we can get Circle, like we have to get Circle. That was his vision that Circle in the Square was the theater to make this happen in. Because we had talked about doing it in a proscenium but taking out seats in the first 10 rows, you know, and then Alex landed on, “No we have to have that thrust feeling and Circle is the perfect place.”

DEADLINE: Were you a fan of Bobby Darin before all this?

GROFF: I knew the music. I knew “Splish Splash,” I knew “Dream Lover,” I knew “Mack the Knife,” I knew “If I Were a Carpenter,” but I didn’t know that they were all sung by the same person. I certainly didn’t know that he was a songwriter as much as he was a performer. I didn’t know that he was an actor as well, Oscar-nominated actor, and so eight years ago when I started [down] the YouTube rabbit hole I was like, “Whoa.” The thing really, though, that was the revelation after Ted asked me to do this night of his music is, I went online and there’s all these amazing clips of him on The Ed Sullivan Show, and all these places he’s been performing live and his TV specials, and on The Judy Garland Show.

And I was like, oh my God this guy, he’s not just singing songs he’s singing for his life. Like, I knew his music as like great kind of oldies music, but watching him perform the music is a different experience than listening to him sing the music. He was an animal when he was performing and that was the thing that I really was like, “Oh, wow this guy, this guy is vibrating on a whole other level.”

DEADLINE: I’m much older than you are, but I remember him from when I was a kid and my mom loved him so that was kind of like the kiss of death. I wanted to hear Led Zeppelin. It wasn’t until years later I saw how good he really was. Mom was right when she turned the channel every week to his TV show.

GROFF: The last year of his life he shot a full season of like eight or 10 episodes of The Bobby Darin Show right before he passed. But it’s interesting you mention that about your mom and the style of music, because Bobby was like a decade behind Sinatra and Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr. So just as rock and roll was starting, so was he, but he was so really passionate and loved that kind of old-school American songbook stuff, and Johnny Mercer, which I also really relate too.

And he really, really respected the old-timers or the old school show business vaudeville stuff. He was really close with George Burns. He actually slept in the bed with George Burns for three nights after Gracie Allen died. That’s how tight they were.

He wanted to be a great entertainer, and I feel like part of that came from his reverence for the generations before, in the same way that Lady Gaga spent those years creating with Tony Bennett. And it wasn’t that she was copying or imitating Tony Bennett, she was celebrating him and his music and doing it in her own way. I can relate to Bobby liking the people in the generation before him because I’m such a huge Bobby Darin fan now.

DEADLINE: His first big hit was the early rock and roll “Splish Splash” in 1958 which would prove to be kind of an anomaly for him.

GROFF: Can you imagine being 22-years-old and you’re like a rock and roll global sensation with a song that you wrote, and then saying to Ahmet Ertegun of all people, “I want to do standards and if you’re not going to pay for it, I’ll pay for it myself, which he did? That’s how much he believed in what he was wanting to put out there in this reach back to the standards. I mean, it was a real risk.

DEADLINE: In Just In Time, the first thing the audience hears is your introduction as Jonathan, not Bobby. What was your thinking to take that approach, to essentially appear as Jonathan-as-Bobby?

GROFF: Yes, we decided to do that early in the development process. Part of the reason I felt strongly about making it like a nightclub setting was because by all accounts, you know, he was this Grammy winning recording artist, and an Oscar-nominated actor, and a prolific producer and writer, but he was at the height of his power when he was at the center of a nightclub floor. And in all of the videos and clips that I watched, and by all accounts of everybody talking about what it was like to see him live, it was electric because he was so in the moment, and he was so present, and you felt like when you were watching him anything could happen.

And so, I raised my hand early on, as we were developing it, and I asked could I start the show as myself so that we create this invisible thread between performer and audience and we’re not forcing people to be like extras in the 1958 Copacabana when they’re sitting at tables. To eventually say, like, here we are in a nightclub environment, in a nightclub space, there’s a band onstage. It’s 2025, you’re here to see a show, I’m here to do a show for you, and let’s all be here in this present moment now, which was, which really to me, if we’re going to tell the story of Bobby Darin’s life or we’re going to try to shine a light on who he was, that is the most essential piece of who he was, which was right now, right here in the present moment with you the audience and this love affair back and forth.

I wanted to establish that without even the artifice of character before we got into the telling of his story. That felt like the most important thing to push to the front energetically in invoking the spirit of who he was and sharing with the audience what his story was.

DEADLINE: And it doesn’t constrain you into doing an outright imitation. We know you’re Jonathan Groff onstage in this space, and you are singing the songs of Bobby Darin, but it’s not a dead-on imitation.

GROFF: Exactly. And this works for his story because when you listen to “Splish Splash,” and “Mack the Knife,” and “If I Were a Carpenter” it sounds like three different people because he was such a chameleon. So unlike, you know, playing Michael Jackson or Dolly Parton or Frank Sinatra even…

DEADLINE: Or Frankie Valli of the Four Seasons in Jersey Boys.

GROFF: Frankie Valli, exactly. There is such a specific way that those performers sound that, that actors have to imitate, but with Bobby Darin, he was imitating everybody else around him. It sort of opens up this opportunity to be able to shape shift and like you said I don’t have to do an impersonation of Bobby Darin because he was such a chameleon as an artist. He was doing so many different types of music and singing in so many different styles that having the opportunity to start as myself and then sing all those different styles feels, in a way, honoring who he was.

DEADLINE: Can you pick one favorite song of his either to listen to or perform?

GROFF: Oh, wow. I went down this rabbit hole with Bobby Darin eight years ago and I’m literally still in it, and even more so now that we’re in the show I can’t stop looking at clips of him. The clip that I’m loving most recently of his is him singing, “I Wish I Were in Love Again.” I don’t even know what TV appearance this is on, it’s in color, but watching him sing that right now is my favorite thing to watch. And I would say performance-wise there’s this like sequence at the end of the first act when there are two songs back-to-back that I love doing and its “Lazy River” into “Mack the Knife.”

And we sort of like built this sequence where his mother, or the woman that he thinks is his mother, has passed and she comes back and he decides to perform that song inspired by her and for her [“Lazy River”], and then that kind of dovetails into “Mack the Knife.” And it’s like drugs for me, I am on such a high out there, it really is such an epic high. And so, going from that kind of dramatic low all the way through to “Look out old Mack, he is back!” at the end of act one is really just so fun.

DEADLINE: Whose idea was it to do the Lotte Lenya bit, when she, or someone like her, sings a bit of ‘Moritat vom Mackie Messer,” the original Threepenny Opera version “Mack the Knife.” It’s very funny but also shows how radically he developed the song into a pop hit.

GROFF: We found that at the Y when we performed seven and a half years ago. We were just doing a lecture about Bobby Darin, you know, sort of saying he was born here and then he did this. No one was actually like playing any characters, so to speak, but that was part of what we were trying to show in the lecture, the artistry of Bobby Darin and how he would hear these songs and find a new way in.

And so we had the ensemble at that concert sing part of that [original version] and then I went into “Mack the Knife” to sort of illuminate how that happened.

DEADLINE: I asked you what your favorite song was. But what is your favorite dance in the show?

GROFF: Shannon Lewis, our choreographer, she’s been in 10 Broadway shows as a dancer. She was in the original cast of Fosse, and she’s done a lot of choreography, a lot for like film and television, and she’s done stuff regionally, but this is her choreographic Broadway debut, and she gave me 10 weeks of dance lessons, three times a week, before the first day of rehearsal. Because I never danced like this before and it’s like training for a marathon so I’m able to do eight shows a week.

I still everyday do her 30 minute warm-up before the show, so that I can make it through without injuring myself. But what she opened up for me, in regards to the choreography, is there is, the complete tapestry from old-school vaudevillian showbiz combined with stuff like you’d see on Hullabaloo.

DEADLINE: I was just going to say Shindig.

GROFF: Exactly, yes. And so, not only do I get to dance, but I also get to dance in these different styles, which is also reflective of his artistry, I mean, he did so many different things. And at the end in the final sequence, in sort of a nod to his Vegas era, we’ve got the girls with the fans, and I’m standing on the table and doing a kind of like showbiz, almost like All That Jazz adjacent kind of movement together with the fans.

And so, the gift of the dance is all of the different corners from “Queen of the Hop,” for example, which comes in a place in the show where Bobby is over being a rock and roller. He wants to be playing in nightclubs, he wants to play the Copa, but here he is on the road doing this rock and roll sort of like teen kids stuff, you know, teen music. And so, Shannon has built in this sort of like Hullabaloo dance that also is a way to express his anger and aggression. I’m doing these sort of moves but it’s full of rage.

And there’s the dance duet that Erika Henningsen, as Sandra Dee, and I do in Act Two for “Irresistible You,” sort of a nod to the White Christmas but at the same time there’s a great deal of sexual tension because our characters haven’t had sex yet, so there’s a lot of like sexuality being expressed in the dance, and kind of a cat and mouse happening. Shannon’s a real storyteller as a choreographer, so being able to tell the story via different styles of dance is really the gift of getting to dance on the show.

DEADLINE: At the beginning of the show you get a huge laugh when you reference how wet your co-stars are going to get. When did the spitting become such a thing?

GROFF: That goes all the way back to Spring Awakening. People would ask me to spit in their programs at the stage door because I had spat on them during the show and they’d asked if I could spit in their program. Then it evolved further when I was playing King George in Hamilton and I was spitting but unable to like wipe it off my face because my hands were under this giant cape. When the Disney+ version during Covid came out there are, like, close-ups of me dribbling all over myself.

And then last year during Merrily when Dan [Radcliffe], and Lindsay [Mendez], and I were on our press tour during that show we did this lie-detector test interview where I talked about being wet onstage and it became this like whole thing. So, it’s followed me my whole career and now I’m finally owning it.

DEADLINE: I saw you in Little Shop of Horrors and I remember thinking those people in the front row are going to be soaked.

GROFF: It’s funny you say that because at Little Shop that theater doesn’t have any spotlights. When a spotlight is shining on you onstage you can’t really see anything, you can’t see the people in the audience. But at the Westside Theatre, which is a very tiny theater and there are no spotlights, for the first time I could really clearly see the first three rows, and for the first time I could see people lifting their programs in front of their face when I would walk down stage.

DEADLINE: No.

GROFF: Yes. They covered their faces to keep me from spitting on them.

DEADLINE: Or maybe they just wanted your spit on their programs.