For the past year, night after night, an actor with the look of a child who has just opened the birthday present he always wanted has been saying “I love you” to 700 people. Those are the last words Jonathan Groff utters in “Just in Time,” the popular biomusical at Broadway’s Circle in the Square, from which he’ll be departing this month.
Though he has been portraying Bobby Darin, a chart-topping pop singer of the 1950s and ’60s, Groff delivers that declaration as Jonathan Groff, a wide-eyed 40-year-old who for more than two hours has been doing, as his friends often put it, exactly what he was put on Earth to do.
That would be exulting in the ability to sing and dance and act with virtuosic agility. Few stage stars today transmit and receive such unadulterated joy in live performance, and that energy translates into a sweet, platonic eroticism.
So when he says “I love you” to an audience with whom he has flirted, danced and locked eyes throughout the show, there is little doubt that the feeling is reciprocated. Alex Timbers, the musical’s director, recalled telling Groff during previews that everyone watching him seemed to believe that he was addressing them individually. Groff’s answer was delivered with absolute sincerity: “I am.”
On March 29, when Groff leaves “Just in Time,” he will do so with the assurance that the unlikely project he nurtured for eight years — a jukebox musical about a hard-living, often angry man with whom he would appear to have little in common — has transformed him, at last and definitively, into a hallowed archetypal figure that has all but vanished from Broadway in recent years.
I mean the musical comedy leading man or — to use an old-fashioned term that suits someone for whom vintage theater lore is personal mythology — the matinee idol. While a younger Groff charmed Broadway two decades ago with his Tony-nominated performance in “Spring Awakening” and then as King George III in “Hamilton,” his ascendance into full musical stardom has evolved only in the past six years.
It began with his complexly creepy take on a warped-by-shyness nerd in the Off Broadway sleeper hit “Little Shop of Horrors,” and was followed by his Tony-winning turn as an egocentric movie producer in Maria Friedman’s triumphant resurrection of the Sondheim musical “Merrily We Roll Along,” with his take on the self-destructive Darin in “Just in Time” truly sealing the deal.
It was during that Sondheim show, Groff said, that Friedman taught him the importance of meeting the eyes of audience members, which he had always been reluctant to do. Groff said he now finds the experience of regularly making that connection “transcendent” and “unbearably moving.”
These were entirely different parts; Groff has eluded being typecast. And the next role for this newly anointed leading man? The leading lady, Rosalind, in an all-male “As You Like It” this fall for the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon, England. (More on that later.)
In any case, according to Michael Mayer, who directed Groff in “Spring Awakening” and “Little Shop”: “He’s now established himself as someone who can open and sustain a show. And this at a time when star power is pretty much one of the only things that can guarantee viability for a musical.”
(“Just in Time” is poised to be become one of the few Broadway musicals in recent seasons to become profitable; after Groff’s departure, he will be replaced by Matthew Morrison and then Jeremy Jordan.)
Openly, Wholesomely Gay
Though swoon-making matinee idols were a staple of the Broadway musical in the mid-20th century, for the past 50 years it’s largely been female stars — Audra! Kristin! Bernadette! Patti! — who have inspired that kind of passion. Yet despite his strapping all-American handsomeness, Groff is no throwback to the days when John Raitt and Alfred Drake ruled the stage.
For one thing, he is openly, wholesomely gay. He addresses his sexuality in his opening monologue in “Just in Time,” in which he parses what sets him apart from the playboy Darin, as well as the voracious need to entertain that they share.
He conjures for the audience the piquant image of himself as a boy twirling in his “mother’s heels in Pennsylvania Amish country to our father’s records.” Isaac Oliver, who wrote those speeches for Groff, recalls asking him, “How gay can we make this?” Groff answered, “Very gay.” (The monologue also allows Groff to address his notoriety as “a wet man,” who both spits and sweats a lot in performance.)
Andy Einhorn, who has worked with stars like Audra McDonald and Barbara Cook and was the music director on a 2018 concert staging of “Just in Time,” said, “When you think about performers that audiences are really drawn to, there is an innate sexuality that transcends the footlights; you feel the pheromones in a way.” Of Groff, he said: “Men and women alike can love him. And I think that is how the clock is turning on what being a matinee idol can mean.”
Probably the only other latter-day male Broadway musical star who exudes that intense gender-crossing charisma is one whose name comes up frequently in conversations about Groff. That’s Hugh Jackman, whose galvanizing performances as the Australian entertainer Peter Allen in “The Boy From Oz” and as himself (and Allen) in his revues are a prototype for what Groff wanted to achieve with “Just in Time.” Another source of inspiration: the fabled Liza Minnelli television special, “Liza With a Z.”
“He has a real awareness of the people who’ve come before him,” Oliver said. “He’s got a Ph.D. from the YouTube university of gay elders and icons.”
Groff vividly recalled watching Jackman in “The Boy From Oz” in 2004 with his mother and his high school math teacher from Lancaster, Pa. “I’ve never seen anything like that before or since onstage,” he said of Jackman. As a 19-year-old on the bus for a non-Equity tour of “The Sound of Music” (cast as Rolf, the angel-faced Nazi), he would listen to “When I Get My Name in Lights” from that show. “There was an energy about that and about him that went through my body and is still there.”
When people in the business talk about Groff, they almost invariably say two things: a) He is one of the kindest, most decent people you’ll ever meet (Mayer compared his aura to that of Gregory Peck in “To Kill a Mockingbird”); and b) He is, as Friedman said, “a theater animal, and they don’t make them very often anymore.”
First Obsessions
The animals he grew up among in Pennsylvania farm country were of a different ilk. (His father trained and raced horses.) Yet he instinctively gravitated toward things theatrical from early childhood. In fourth grade, he attended a high school production of “Annie Get Your Gun” and promptly went to the Lancaster Public Library to check out the original Broadway cast album with Ethel Merman.
“It became my first obsession,” he said, “and it just happened to be old-school Broadway. The call of Ethel Merman. I guess it’s a tale as old as time for a young gay boy.” In eighth grade, he got the lead in the school play (it was called “Best of the West”) and “it was like a switch flipped.”
Theater became a thrilling escape for an adolescent who had yet to acknowledge to himself that he was gay. “I got to be like romantic and be angry and be sexual and be expressive in the theater,” he said.
As a high school senior, he taught himself choreography from “Thoroughly Modern Millie,” then a Broadway hit, by watching a VHS tape of the cast performing at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. (The energetic star of “Millie,” Sutton Foster, had replaced Merman as his ruling obsession.)
When he learned about an open call for replacements, he had his mother drive him to New York. He sat outside the theater in the deep freeze of January from 5:30 a.m. to be the first non-Equity performer through the door. After singing seven bars for his audition and receiving a pro forma thank you, he announced he knew the choreography, too, and proceeded to dance.
He got two callbacks but had to go home before the second. The part he did land was the one in “The Sound of Music.” He moved to New York City and, at 20, auditioned for “Spring Awakening,” the electrifying rock adaptation of the Frank Wedekind classic about repressed adolescents discovering their sexuality.
Jim Carnahan, the casting director on that show (and later “Merrily” and “Little Shop”), remembered that, uncannily, “from the get-go, he was as calm and collected as always.” Groff won the romantic lead of the rebellious Melchior. But he said the “Spring Awakening” character was very little like him.
“He was a rebel,” Groff said. “He didn’t let the world define him. He was outwardly sexual, and I was a closeted people pleaser.” Still, he said, “I really felt a primal impulse to get into his skin. And that show changed my life.” The first action he took, a month after leaving the show, “was coming out of the closet.”
It’s here that Groff’s career began to deviate from the classic a-musical-star-is-born script. He was a poignant presence in the Public Theater’s revival of “Hair” in Central Park (but chose not to follow that production to Broadway) and a knockout in the small but memorable role of King George III in “Hamilton.”
“When I came out of the closet, I felt like I was consciously picking a life in theater,” he said, thinking Hollywood might have a problem casting openly gay men in leading roles at the time. “I thought I’m sort of choosing to prioritize my life over career, and I kind of gave up any expectation of a traditional trajectory for success.”
He sought out non-musical roles Off Broadway and was cast in leading roles in adventurous streaming series, playing both straight (“Mindhunter”) and gay (“Looking”). He returned to the musical fold with “Little Shop.”
Uncommonly Centered
And now there is Rosalind, the cross-dressing heroine of “As You Like It.” Daniel Evans, the co-artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, saw Groff in “Just in Time” and, he wrote in an email, recalled “watching Jonathan play Bobby Darrin and come in and out of character, being able to turn on a dime, to change the atmosphere of a room and connect to the audience on a very deep emotional level.” He concluded, “That’s what I wanted from my Rosalind!”
When Groff heard from Evans, he answered with an email for which the subject line is unprintable but that suggests boundless, amazed enthusiasm. So the actor — who took intensive dance, drums and piano lessons for “Just in Time” — since January has been learning to speak the speech of Shakespeare in Zoom sessions with Evans and the celebrated British voice coach Patsy Rodenburg.
He said Rosalind will be the first female character he’s played since he dressed up as Mary Poppins as a toddler. “I’m going to be really reaching back to my 3-year-old self,” he said. “Obviously, it was my first essential impulse.”
In one-on-one conversation, Groff — who is now in a romantic relationship not only with his audience, but also with a man (not an actor) he’s been seeing for about seven and a half months — somehow comes across as both bouncy and uncommonly centered. His dressing room is a testament to his enduring status as an unabashed fanboy. A neon sign spells out “BARbra,” in homage to Barbra Streisand. Her visage appears on a votive candle in his bathroom, as does that of Beyoncé.
There is also a paper plate — an ersatz Tony Award devised by fellow cast members — bearing the words “Most likely to turn into a Cherry Halls,” a reference to the mentholated lozenge he lodges in his mouth when he performs to keep his throat lubricated and mucus at bay. (He said his backup singers for “Just in Time” say they can smell him before he makes his entrance via elevator lift.)
Groff does a half-hour dance warm-up before every performance and said he never gets nervous waiting to go on. “I’m like a horse,” he said. “It’s the adrenaline. It’s like ‘Let’s go!’”
He said he cherishes the ephemerality of live theater, the sense of its existing only in the moment it’s performed, and how it evokes getting lost in the games of make-believe of his childhood.
As a boy, he said, he was saddened by stories in which fantasies dissolved into reality, like the sidewalk chalk pictures that came to life as animated cartoons and then melted away in the rain in the movie “Mary Poppins,” or the moment at the end of “Peter Pan” when the grown-up Wendy is told she’s too old to return to Neverland.
Though Groff’s friends will tell you that you rarely see him down, he looked a shade melancholy as he described leaving the stage at the end of each performance of “Hair” in Central Park.
It was after the cast had danced with the audience to the affirmative “Let the Sunshine In,” he said. “And I would walk down the back stairs and I would feel the same way I felt when I would stop playing as a kid. And I remember thinking, ‘This is why people end up doing drugs.’ Because this is such a high out here, and it’s like magic, and then you leave, and” — he looked startled, even remembering the moment — “Oh, we’re in real life again.”
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