When Jonathan Groff says “I’m a wet man,” he means it.
The admission comes near the start of “Just in Time,” the Bobby Darin bio-musical that opened on Saturday at Circle in the Square. It’s a warning to the 22 audience members seated at cabaret tables in the middle of the action that they may want to don raincoats as he sings and dances, sweating and spitting, a-splishin’ and a-splashin’.
But Groff is wet in another sense too: He’s a rushing pipeline, a body and voice that seem to have evolved with the specific goal of transporting feelings from the inside to the outside. A rarity among male musical theater stars, he is thrilling not just sonically but also emotionally, all in one breath.
And Darin, the self-described “nightclub animal” who bounced from bopper to crooner to quester to recluse, is a great fit for him. Not because they are alike in temperament, other than a compulsion to entertain and be embraced by an audience. Nor do they sound alike: Groff’s voice is lovelier than Darin’s, rounder and healthier. But the Broadway and Brill Building songs Darin sang, some of which he wrote, offer the scale, the snap and the bravura opportunities that are more often, now as then, a diva’s birthright, not a divo’s.
In other words, Groff is sensational.
“Just in Time,” directed by Alex Timbers, with a book by Warren Leight and Isaac Oliver, at first seems like it will be too. Certainly the opening is a wonderful jolt. Making the smart choice to introduce Groff as himself, not as Darin, the show immediately breaks out of the jukebox box, liberating its songs from service as literal illustrations. My dread that oldies involving the word “heart” would be shoehorned into the story line about Darin’s rheumatic fever was temporarily tamped.
Instead, “Just in Time” begins as a straight-ahead floor show in the Las Vegas style, with Groff, in a perfectly cut suit by Catherine Zuber, buzzing between song and patter while seducing the audience. The set designer Derek McLane has converted Circle’s awkward oval into a sumptuous supper club, with silver Austrian draperies covering the walls and clinking glasses of booze at the cabaret tables. A bandstand at one end of the playing space, and banquettes surrounding a mini-stage at the other, suggest a blank showbiz canvas, with flashy gold-and-indigo lighting by Justin Townsend to color it in. Darin, it seems, will be merely a pretext.
True, the opening number — Steve Allen’s brassy “This Could Be the Start of Something” — is a song Darin famously sang. And so is the swingy hit “Beyond the Sea,” which comes next. But in big-wow arrangements by Andrew Resnick for an 11-piece combo, they illustrate little more than themselves and the entertainment at hand. At most they suggest Darin subtly, in their desperation masquerading as charm.
The relief of that subtlety lasts only a while. “Beyond the Sea” soon leads us back to Darin’s contentious childhood in East Harlem. There, Groff drops his own persona and enters that of the sickly boy born Walden Robert Cassotto in 1936, indulged by the maternal Polly (Michele Pawk) and fretted over by the sisterly Nina (Emily Bergl). Nina’s fretting is justifiable: A doctor has decreed that Bobby will not live past 16. Trying to keep him from excitement, she treats him like an invalid.
But Polly, a former vaudeville performer, wants him to make the most of whatever time and gift he has; if he’s an invalid, she says, “he’s an invalid who’s going to be a star.” She teaches him songs and how to perform them: Hands, she says, are “your real backup singers.” That’s a neat touch because we’ve already seen in Groff’s performance how the adult Darin absorbed the lesson. His madly expressive hands do nearly as much dancing (choreography by Shannon Lewis) as the three women in silver-spangled minidresses who accompany his bandstand numbers.
The scenes of his early professional efforts maintain some of that charm, and the songs are legitimate examples of what Darin was singing at the time. (Mostly jingles and rip-offs.) But as the emotional biography takes precedence, jukebox-itis sets in and the tone goes haywire. Darin’s youthful courtship of the rising star Connie Francis (Gracie Lawrence) is played for laughs, even the part about her mafia-adjacent father threatening to kill him. Still, by hook or crook, it leads to her singing her 1958 megahit weepie “Who’s Sorry Now?”
More troubling is the show’s treatment of his subsequent relationship with the teenage Sandra Dee (Erika Henningsen). Introduced inaptly with Darin’s self-pitying “Not for Me,” Dee, already the bubbly star of “Gidget,” quickly devolves into a hard-drinking virago after their marriage and the birth of their son, Dodd. But unlike Darin, Dee is given no pass. That she was repeatedly raped by her stepfather over a period of four years, starting when she was 8, is relegated to a throwaway line (“You don’t know what happened when I was a kid”) that no one new to the story could possibly interpret.
Though “Just in Time” does not completely whitewash Darin — it has been produced with the cooperation of Dodd Darin, whose 1994 book about his parents is very frank — the show does seek to soften and in that way excuse him. A dotted line connects his mistreatment of Dee to his chaotic upbringing. The narcissism others accuse him of — which he calls egotism, thinking that’s better — is chalked up to perfectionism. The constant churn in his relationship with collaborators, managers and record executives, played by various ensemble members, is depreciated as the cost of artistic growth; he’s a savant and a dreamer, not just a purveyor of novelty numbers like “Splish Splash.”
Some of these tonal problems are mitigated by having Groff play him: We like Darin more than the facts (and his scary hit “Mack the Knife”) suggest we should. That was also the case in Groff’s performance as the (fictional) songwriter Franklin Shepard in “Merrily We Roll Along,” for which he won a Tony Award last year. In some ways reversing the trajectory of that character, Darin bumps from idealism to disillusion via divorce and alienation. But Shepard is a successful antihero because “Merrily” is carefully constructed to dramatize the path.
A quasi-concert cannot do that, especially with songs written for other reasons. As the angst of the story takes over, and the tunestack dives into B-sides, “Just in Time” succumbs to narrative arthritis, its plot points scraping against each other and baring the show’s revue-like bones. (It began as a 2018 “Lyrics & Lyricists” concert at the 92nd Street Y, based on a concept by Ted Chapin.) All the symptoms are there: the collar-yanking segues, the undigested Wikipedia backfill, the unlikely news bulletins. “There’s important things going on in the world,” Darin helpfully informs Dee and us. “Vietnam. Civil rights.”
By the time of his death, at 37, in 1973, the show’s final descent into lugubrious eulogy — “He finished six years of grammar school in four years and got a scholarship medal besides,” Nina says — has swamped its early buoyancy with platitudes. Yet Groff is still swimming, right to the end. Dismayed as I was to endure so much else, I have to admit he’s giving one of Broadway’s best performances. So who’s sorry now?
Just In Time
At Circle in the Square, Manhattan; justintimebroadway.com. Running time: 2 hours 25 minutes.
