‘Just in Time’ Review: Jonathan Groff Channels Bobby Darin

When Jonathan Groff says “I’m a wet man,” he means.

The admission is close to the beginning of “just in time”, the bio-musical Bobby Darin that opened on Saturday in Circle in the Square. It is a warning to the 22 members of the audience sitting at the cabaret tables in the middle of the action may want to get into the rain while sings and dance, sweating and spitting, A-Splishin ‘and A-Plashin’.

But Groff is also law in another sense: it is a hurried pipe, a body and a voice that seem to have evolved with the specific objective of transporting feelings from the inside out. A rarity among the stars of masculine musical theater, is exciting not only sound but also emotionally, all in one breath.

And Darin, the self -denominated “nightclub animal” who bounced a singer to recruit from Bopper to recruit, is a great option for him. Not because they are the same in the temperament, apart from a compulsion of entertaining and being adopted by an audience. Nor do they sound the same: Groff’s voice is more beautiful than Darin’s, more round and healthy. But Broadway and Brill Building Darin songs, some of which wrote the scale, Snap and Bravura’s opportunities that are more often, now as the birth right of a diva, not a divos.

In other words, Groff is sensational.

“Just in time”, directed by Alex Timbers, with a book by Warren Leight and Isaac Oliver, at first it seems that it will also be. Certainly, the opening is a wonderful jolt. Making the intelligent decision to introduce Groff as himself, not as Darin, the program immediately leaves the record box, releasing his songs from service as literal illustrations. My fear that the old people who involve the word “heart” would fit into the history of Darin’s rheumatic fever temporarily tampos.

On the other hand, “Just in Time” begins as a direct floor show in Las Vegas style, with Groff, in a perfectly cut suit of Catherine Zuber, buzzing between Song and Pattery while seducing the audience. The Set Derek McLane designer has turned the awkward circle oval into a dinner club, with silver Austrian curtains they cover the walls and alcohol glasses on the cabaret tables. A band kiosk at one end of the game space, and the sidewalks that surround a mini stage in the other, suggest a white show canvas, with striking gold lighting and indigo of Justin Towsend to color it. Darin, it seems, it will simply be a pretext.

It is true that the opening number, the Brassy of Steve Allen, “this could be the beginning of something,” is a song that Darin sang. And so is the dark success “Beyond the Sea”, which comes next. But in Big-Wow Arms of Andrew Resnick for an 11-piece combo, illustrate little more than Themelves and entertainment in question. At most, Darin suggests subtly, in their despair disguised as charm.

The relief of that subtlety lasts only for a while. “Beyond The Sea” soon takes us back to Darin’s contentious childhood in East Harlem. There, Groff leaves his own personality and enters that of the sick child born Walden Robert Cassotto in 1936, consented to the maternal polly (Michele Pawk) and worried about sister Nina (Emily Bergl). Nina’s concern is justifiable: a doctor has decreed that Bobby will not live at age 16. Trying to prevent emotion from treating him as an invalid.

But Polly, a former vaodevil artist, wants you to make the most of the time and gift she has; If he is invalid, she says: “It is an invalid who will be a star.” She teaches her songs and how to interpret them: the hands, he says, they are “your true backup singers.” That is a good touch because we have already seen in Groff’s performance how the adult Darin absorbed the lesson. His madly expressive hands dance almost so much (choreography of Shannon Lewis) as the three women in silver minirres who accompany their numbers of kiosks.

The scenes of his first professional efforts Mintain some of that charm, and the songs are legitimate examples of what Darin was singing at that time. (Mainly jingles and scams). But as emotional biography has priority, disc discs is established and the tone goes crazy. Darin’s youth courtship of the ascent star Connie Francis (Gracie Lawrence) is played to laugh, even the role of his father adjacent to the mafia that threatens to kill him. Even so, by Hook or Crook, he takes her to sing his Megahit Weepie of 1958 “Who feels it now?”

More worrying is the treatment of the program of her subsequent relationship with the teenager Sandra Dee (Erika Henningen). Introduced inappropriately with Darin’s self -pity “not for me”, from, and the bubbling star of “Gidget”, it quickly becomes a virician who drinks long after his marriage and the birth of his son, Dodd. But unlike Darin, no pass is given. Which was repeatedly raped by its stepfather around a period of four years, starting when I was 8 years old, it is relegated to a disposable line (“you don’t know what happened when I was a child”) that no one new in history could.

The thought “right in time” not completely enchanted to Darin, has occurred with the cooperation of Dodd Darin, whose 1994 book about his parents is very frank, the show looks softened and, in that way, apologize. A dotted line connects Dee’s mistreatment with his chaotic education. Narcissism others accuse him or, that he calls egotism, thinking that this is better, is attributed to perfectionism. The constant agitation in their relationship with collaborators, managers and record executives, interpreted by several members of the set, is depressed as the cost of artistic growth; He is a wise and a dreamer, not just a supplier of innovative numbers like “Splish Splash”.

Some of the tonal problems are mitigated by making Groff interpret it: we like them more than the facts (and his terrifying blow “Mack the Knife”) suggests. That was also the case in Groff’s performance as the composer (fictional) Franklin Shepard in “Mriry We Roll Aía”, so he won a Tony award last year. Somehow, reverse the trajectory of that character, Darin hits idealism into disappointment through divorce and alienation. But Shepard is a successful antihero because “Mriry” is carefully built to dramatize the way.

A Quasi-Concertio cannot do that, as special with songs written for other reasons. As the fear of history occurs, and Tunestack immerses itself on sides B, “just in time” succumbs to narrative arthritis, its plot points scraping against each bones of andher and Baring Liking Revue. (A 2018 concert “Lyrics & Lyricists” began at 92nd Street and, based on a concept of Ted Chapin.) All symptoms are there: the being that and edit the necklace, the wikipedia filling without digesting, the unlikely news bulletins. “There are important things in the world,” Darin reports in a useful way and us. “Vietnam. Civil rights.”

At the time of his death, at 37, in 1973, the final decline in the program to the dreary eloogy: “He finished six years of grammar in four years and won a scholarship medal in addition,” says Nina, has flooded her. However, Groff is still swimming, until the end. Disrupted how to endure so much more, I have to admit that he is giving one of Broadway’s best performances. So who sorry now?

Just in time
In Circle in the square, Manhattan; Jusintimebroadway.com. Execution time: 2 hours 25 minutes.