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Time Out
28-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Time Out
Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy
Broadway review by Adam Feldman First things first: Just in Time is a helluva good time at the theater. It's not just that, but that's the baseline. Staged in a dazzling rush by Alex Timbers, the show summons the spirit of a 1960s concert at the Copacabana by the pop crooner Bobby Darin—as reincarnated by one of Broadway's most winsome leading men, the radiant sweetie Jonathan Groff, who gives the performance his considerable all. You laugh, you smile, your heart breaks a little, you swing along with the brassy band, and you're so well diverted and amused that you may not even notice when the ride you're on takes a few unconventional turns. Unlike most other jukebox-musical sources, Darin doesn't come with a long catalogue of signature hits. If you know his work, it's probably from four songs he released in 1958 and 1959: the novelty soap bubble 'Splish Splash,' the doo-wop bop 'Dream Lover' and two European cabaret songs translated into English, 'Beyond the Sea' and 'Mack the Knife.' What he does have is a tragically foreshortened life. 'Bobby wanted nothing more than to entertain, wherever he could, however he could, in whatever time he had, which it turns out was very little,' Groff tells us at the top of the show. 'He died at 37.' Darin's bum heart—so weak that doctors thought he wouldn't survive his teens—is the musical's countdown clock; it beats like a ticking time bomb. Just in Time | Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy Warren Leight and Isaac Oliver's agile script, suggested by an idea of Ted Chapin's, avoids the maudlin as it takes us from Darin's fatherless childhood in East Harlem through his death in 1973. The story's main figures are given dignity and wit, especially the four women: Michele Pawk as his tenderly acidulous mother; Emily Bergl as his self-abnegating sister; Gracie Lawrence as his first love, the singer Connie Francis; and Erika Henningsen as his first wife, the wholesome-movie actress Sandra Dee. The men are all played by three actors (Lance Roberts, Joe Barbara and Caesar Samayoa) in a jaunty panoply of costumes and wigs. Completing the company are the Sirens (Christine Cornish, Julia Grondin and Valeria Yamin), three leggy showgirls, bedecked in feathers and paillettes by costumer Catherine Zuber, who glitter like jewels amid the handsome Art Décolletage of Derek McLane's set; they are choreographed by Shannon Lewis, who danced 'I Gotcha' in Broadway's Fosse and has a gift for rendering glitz in motion. Just in Time | Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy But this is really Groff's show. Just in Time transforms Circle in the Square into a swank New York nightclub—walls of Austrian curtains enfold the audience in a world of retro glamour, and twenty or so spectators sit at cabaret tables just in front of the main stage—but the effect is not so much to take us back to Darin's era as to fashion a space for the star concert we are watching in the present: Groff's. Disarmingly, Groff begins and ends the show as himself, the actor Jonathan Groff, who is starring in a Broadway show and giving you everything you could want from him. He sings! He dances! He plays the piano! He strips down to skimpy blue briefs! And, as always, he shows his work. Never let them see you sweat? Au contraire. The Darin that Just in Time serves us is slathered with Groffsauce, or at minimum liberally spattered with it. ('I'm a wet man,' Groff says upfront. 'I'm just generally extremely very wet when I do this, and I'm sorry in advance.') Some performers get flop sweat. Groff has hit sweat—it's the steam he lets off when he's cooking. Just in Time | Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy Paradoxically, Leight and Oliver's metatheatrical framing device may be why the show succeeds so well at capturing the feeling of a Darin concert. Actor and role are telescoped into one, which changes your relationship to the performance: When you applaud the nightclub sequences, you're not just playing your part as an audience member in a recreation of a Bobby Darin concert; you're delighting in and rooting for the real-life Jonathan Groff. And Just in Time does a smart, sneaky thing in the way it approaches being a musical. The songs in the first act are what is known as diegetic; they are delivered as songs, à la Jersey Boys, that the characters perform onstage or in studios or on television. In the second act, however, as Darin romances Dee, songs start to function in the standard musical-theater way: as heightened musical expressions of characters' true thoughts and feelings. But Darin can't live that way for long. By the end, he has returned to the world of diegetic songs, the world of being only a performer. Just in Time | Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy And so what if no real lover can match the dream lover of Darin's lyric? Maybe a fantasy love is all he wants, and maybe the fantasy self he presents as a performer is how he wants to be loved. The playboy pop star Bobby Darin, after all, was to some extent a character played by one Walden Robert Cassotto, a sickly kid desperate to get the highest return on his borrowed time. (He took his stage name from the word mandarin, but first he had to cut out the man.) Like Sunset Blvd. and , Just in Time deals with the difference between image and reality. But this show doesn't moralize about that difference. It's finally about the joy of performance, and the escapism it provides not just for an audience but for a performer as well: what it means to be a live show and, for some show people, what it means to be alive. Just in Time. Circle in the Square (Broadway). Book by Warren Leight and Isaac Oliver. Music and lyrics by various writers. Directed by Alex Timbers. With Jonathan Groff, Gracie Lawrence, Erika Henningsen, Michele Pawk, Emily Bergl, Joe Barbara, Lance Roberts, Caesar Samayoa. Running time: 2hr 20mins. One intermission.
CBS News
27-04-2025
- Entertainment
- CBS News
The life of teen idol Bobby Darin
Bobby Darin was a major pop star … a singer, dancer, musician, and an Oscar nominee. He was the entertainer who did it all, except Broadway. Until now! Tony Award-winner Jonathan Groff ("Merrily We Roll Along") plays the icon of the late 1950s and '60s in the musical "Just in Time." "He was at the height of his powers, when he was on the floor of a nightclub with the audience in the palm of his hand," said Groff. For Darin, a live audience was oxygen. So, too, for Groff: "You can feel this vibration between performer and audience member. [It's], to me, the most essential thing to ignite in the telling of his story." Jonathan Groff as Bobby Darin in the Broadway musical "Just in Time." CBS News It's taken seven years and a whole lot of sweat to bring the show to Broadway. The casting of Groff – beloved for his roles on stage, and as Kristoff in the "Frozen" movies – might not seem obvious. Groff grew up on a horse farm in Pennsylvania Mennonite country; Darin was a scrappy Italian kid from the Bronx. I asked Groff to whom he liked listening when he was growing up. "I am in fourth or fifth grade, on the computer or Nintendo in the basement, blasting Ethel Merman, 'Annie Get Your Gun,'" he laughed. "So, this is the 1990s, probably? And you're playing something from the 1940s?" "Exactly!" Likewise, Bobby Darin was an old soul, says his son, Dodd Darin. "He admired, he loved, he respected the old timers. He loved that era of show business. That's what he related to." Singer Bobby Darin performs on "The Ed Sullivan Show," January 3, 1960. CBS Photo Archive via Getty Images That may have had something to do with the woman who raised him: "Polly, his mother, was an old vaudevillian," said Dodd. "And she nurtured him and said, 'You can't play stickball in the street. And you can't roughhouse with kids' ('cause he was frail and sickly). 'But you can learn to sing. You can learn to dance. You can learn to play piano.' And it opened a whole world." "Frail and sickly" was no exaggeration. Born Walden Robert Cassotto, Darin suffered several bouts of rheumatic fever as a child, permanently damaging his heart. When he was a boy, he overheard a family doctor say that he wouldn't live beyond his teenage years. "Put yourself in that position," said Dodd. "So, he was ambitious. He was driven. He was always on the go. He was trying to jam it all in, 'cause he knew he didn't have time." With no time to waste, he began writing songs, and at 22, Bobby Darin made waves with a recording of "Splish Splash." Bobby Darin performs "Splish Splash" (1958): Not one to play it safe, for his second album, in 1959, Darin took a dark ballad from the German "Threepenny Opera" and made it swing. "When my dad took 'Mack the Knife' before it was released and had Dick Clark listen to it, he said, 'Why are you doing this? This is gonna bomb!'" Dodd said. It won the Grammy for record of the year, and became the biggest hit of Darin's career. The next year, he was on his way to Italy to make his motion picture debut opposite America's sweetheart, Sandra Dee. "We hit it right off," Darin said. "She hated me and I loved her, and that was it." The teen idol married the teen movie star in December of 1960, and welcomed their son, Dodd, a year later. Dodd would later write, "My father made his destiny. Destiny made my mother." What did he mean by that? "Well, my mom went through a lot," he said. "Never really wanted fame. She really didn't crave it. It just sort of happened. Unlike my dad, who loved performing, loved show business." Dee was looking for a home life, said Dodd, but Bobby Darin wasn't ready to slow down. The marriage ended after six years. Darin never stopped playing the clubs. Sammy Davis Jr. once said that Bobby Darin was the one person he wouldn't want to have to follow. "Absolutely true," said Dodd. "My dad idolized Sammy." The feeling was mutual, as seen in a 1959 broadcast of "This Is Your Life": Also featured during the episode was Nina, the woman Darin thought was his sister. But almost a decade later he would learn a long-held family secret: Nina was in fact Bobby's mother, having given birth to him out of wedlock as a teenager. Which made Polly, the woman he thought was his mother, his grandmother. "He was never the same," said Dodd. "He said that his whole life was a lie; he was, like, a fraud. It's just devastating. There's no sugarcoating it." Bobby Darin and Nina Cassotto on "This Is Your Life" in 1959. Years later, Darin would learn that Nina was not his sister, but actually his mother. NBC Looking at that tape today, says Dodd, it all seems obvious. "That's a mother's love," he said. "That's not a sister, okay? That's the adulation of, 'This is my son,' but you can't say it." Dodd, who was seven years old when his father found out, remembers a change in your father from that time: "I'm not gonna say it's directly attributed to that incident; I'm sure that's part of it. But he got into the Bob Darin stage, you know? He took off his toupee. No more tuxedo. Started doing folk music, protest music, writing music, and dropped out of show business for a while. "And that was some of the best times I had with him. He was a regular dude. We were up in Big Sur in a trailer, hanging out. And yeah, he let his hair down, if you will. It was good times." Bobby Darin performs "Simple Song of Freedom" (1970): In December of 1973, Bobby Darin's heart finally gave out. He was 37. Dodd had just turned 12. Now 63, Dodd Darin is grateful that, with the new Broadway show, a new generation can learn the story of his father. "It's so beautiful that all these years later – he's been gone over 50 years – we're here talking about him. We're remembering him," said Dodd. "He did something right." You can stream the album "The Ultimate Bobby Darin" by clicking on the embed below (Free Spotify registration required to hear the tracks in full): For more info: Story produced by Kay Lim. Editor: Lauren Barnello. Watch Jonathan Groff perform "Dream Lover" for the cast album recording of "Just in Time":
The Guardian
27-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Just in Time review – Bobby Darin musical is light on detail but big on charm
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.
