Just in Time Broadway Reviews

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?

Contrary to its title, “Just in Time” is anything but timely, since the window of Darin’s relevancy has long gone. Even Darin himself admits in the show that by 1968 he was “yesterday’s news.” Just in time for what, we might ask? Do we really need a whole musical about a straight white man with a few hit songs in the 60s? For that matter, do we need multiple? This is in fact the second Bobby Darin musical (the other, “Dream Lover,” premiered in Australia in 2016), not to mention the Kevin Spacey-led biopic, “Beyond the Sea” from 2004. Does Bobby Darrin really merit this much attention?

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.

The energy of Just in Time is its greatest tribute to Darin: a recreation of his natural habitat buoyed by the dazzling charm of its stars. Everything from the stunning lighting design (courtesy of Justin Townsend) to Groff's crooning vocals emulates a '50s night club. And therein lies the real surprise of the show — beyond honoring Darin in particular, it serves as a love letter to live music.

But it all comes back to Groff. Buoyed by Andrew Resnick and Michael Thurber’s kicky orchestrations, his renditions of Darin’s standards—the brassy, hard-edged “Mack the Knife,” with those insistent key changes, and the absolutely manic, horn-crazed “Once in a Lifetime”—are thrilling. The show is a testament to one man’s pure, unabashed love of performing. Make that two men.

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.

Early in the show, as the band vamps on “Beyond The Sea,” Gross, working the audience, says slyly, “I first heard this next song the way we all first heard this next song – twirling in our mother’s heels in Pennsylvania Amish country, listening to our father’s records…I never would’ve guessed I’d have anything in common with him, the playboy crooner and me in Mom’s pumps, but turns out I do. He loved – [gestures back and forth between himself and the audience] – this. It was the only relationship he was any good at. Honestly? Same.”

Groff makes clear the intention of Just in Time, indeed any show, at its end. “Doing this was when he (Darin) felt the most alive,” he says. “Honestly? Same. This can only happen in this room, right now, with you, and it’ll never happen quite the same way again.” That may read as hokey on the page, but Groff, Leight, and Oliver intend it as a final, heartfelt statement about the power of theater to connect. If nothing else, Just in Time hopes we recognize the efforts of all performers—lost to history, or not—in service of that.

Get ready to book the Palace, the Palladium, the Hollywood Bowl and the Baths of Caracalla! “Just in Time,” the new Bobby Darin bio-musical that opened Saturday at Circle in the Square, makes it clear that headliner Jonathan Groff is ready for his own solo show on any of the world’s most famous stages

The energy verges from electric to manic, in a way that makes you wonder Is Jonathan Groff telling us that he would like to die mid-performance? All right, that’s an exaggeration, but it does move the question of what a star gets out of entertaining, and what an audience gets out of receiving that performance, right to the center of the show, more so than the specific biography of Darin himself. It’s like Prospero at the end of The Tempest turning to the audience to be, finally, released by their applause—if Prospero were wearing a tuxedo and crooning “Beyond the Sea.” Still, as you from crimes would pardoned be, let your indulgence set him free. Cue the megamix.

For a little over two hours, there’s nowhere you’d rather be than at this dazzling dream of a New York that truly never slept, presided over by a Harlem-born singer whose output was so rich and rapid-fire that the man must have been fueled by the dire prognosis he received as a child: Darin wasn’t supposed to live past 16.

In the end, people will come mostly to see Groff, as well they should. He’s fabulous. Plus the timing is just right as this musical-theater actor, shy all those years ago in “Spring Awakening,” now takes up the vital mantle of big Broadway star, a status he has approached before but never fully inhabited. Not until Bobby Darin came along to help. Toward the end, Darin, having been through the wringer but not quite yet met his maker, takes his preferred stage at the Copacabana and shouts, with the cathartic joy of a man who has found his way home, “I am a creature of the nightclub.” On the night I was there, the audience roared, thinking that also of Groff and yet also well aware he’s a talent who will just as easily roam elsewhere.

the show is Mr. Groff’s vehicle, and he rides it splendidly, and tirelessly. I’ll admit I was never a huge fan of Darin; notwithstanding his undeniable technical prowess, his delivery could, for me, have a smarmy, lounge-lizard quality. I’ve always preferred Louis Armstong’s take on “Mack the Knife,” and Frank Sinatra’s version of the title song of “Just in Time,” for that matter. Yet in singing these tunes and others, Mr. Groff manages to channel Darin’s slickness with a rugged dynamism that lends a little more grit to the material, without ever losing sight of his subject’s eagerness to charm. The actor also charts Darin’s offstage life with sensitivity, from his troubled marriage and other personal and professional frustrations to the social consciousness he developed as Vietnam and the civil rights movement became pressing concerns.

It’s the staging and the star’s performance that truly elevate the evening, however. Alex Timbers’ limber, imaginative direction uses the space fantastically, with a large stage at one end of the theater providing enough room for a terrific big band, another smaller one at the opposite side for more intimate interludes, and cabaret tables in the middle. Groff works the room like nobody’s business, going from one end to the other, wandering into the aisles, and, at one point, standing atop one of the small tables which magically starts spinning. It’s no wonder that he apologizes in advance for the profusion of his sweat and saliva that frequently soaks audience members in the best seats, bringing an all too literal meaning to “Splish Splash.”

With an exuberant band, Just in Time rides easy on Groff’s waves of showman charisma while paying tribute to the era-specific music and other singers, especially the women in Darin’s life who inspired his performance, starting with Michele Pawk as a parental figure with a vaudevillian past. The book seamlessly weaves in how other stars like Connie Francis (a blazing, must-see Gracie Lawrence) and Sandra Dee (a commanding Erika Henningsen), the latter of whom witnessed his fallible humanity, were integral to his life.

But the show’s raison d’etre is Groff, who could earn back-to-back Tony Awards with this tour-de-force performance, Moreover, should he ever do a cabaret show, perhaps he should borrow a page from his real-life bestie, Lea Michele, and belt out “I’m the Greatest Star.” I doubt his many fans – old and new – would disagree.

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

With a terrific full band right on stage the entire time, we are transported to the streets of East Harlem, Vegas, and even Portofino thanks to versatile nightclub scenic design by Derek McLane. I task you with finding a leading man today with half the charisma that Jonathan Groff possesses. He brings not just the story, but the very soul of Bobby Darin to life. If there is one musical to see this season, you might as well grab your bathing suit and come Splish Splash in the basement of Wicked - you won’t be disappointed.

Much of what we’re told in “Just in Time” about Darin is a fairly standard show biz story. It’s a measure of how little in his biography there is to work with that the show holds off until nearly the end to reveal a big family secret, one that’s easily available in the most cursory bio of Darin online. But there is some drama in the relationship with Dee. For all his charm as a performer, Darin doesn’t seem like a very nice man. He insists she go on the road with him, and show his fans and hers how much she appreciates his act. He soon tires of her. He sends his brother-in-law turned valet Charlie (Joe Barbara) to relay the message: “He wants a divorce.” There is a hint that his impatience is motivated by his knowledge that he will die young, but it’s buried too deeply beneath an off-putting ambition.