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 The Picture of Dorian Gray, 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.
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Just in Time | Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy
