Someplace past the ocean: Jonathan Groff in Simply in Time.
Picture: Matthew Murphy
It’s straightforward for a present to lose its sense of objective someplace alongside the way in which to Broadway: The director misplaced no matter inventive impulse that they had at the beginning, the producers hedged their bets on its business prospects, the unique star left for a tv gig, and what lastly premiered is one thing half-baked and compromised, the type of factor that leaves you sitting there within the viewers questioning why any of that is taking place. This isn’t true of Simply in Time, a bio-musical about mid-century crooner Bobby Darin starring Jonathan Groff. You possibly can instantly inform why Simply in Time exists. It’s as a result of Jonathan Groff is obsessive about Bobby Darin. He tells you as a lot proper from the highest of the present, in direct tackle as himself: “He liked this,” Groff publicizes, in a tuxedo, gesturing between himself and the stage. “It was the one relationship he was any good at. Truthfully? Similar.”
What follows is a reasonably generic musical retelling of Darin’s life that provides, concurrently, insights into its eager-to-please star. Groff, sizzling off a Tony win for his melancholy however golden Franklin Shepard in Merrily We Roll Alongside, has discovered a approach to lastly deliver his fascination with Darin, who burned quick and vibrant as a singer and nationwide superstar and died at 37 from a longstanding coronary heart situation, to a Broadway stage. It helps, on this case, that Groff’s curiosity within the singer has sufficient overlap with the ticket-buying pursuits of tri-state audiences who would possibly’ve grown up listening to him to make the venture commercially viable. (That Kevin Spacey additionally had an curiosity in Darin that he was a movie is a notable quirk of coincidence on this complete enterprise.) Onstage, Groff tells his viewers he grew up in Amish Pennsylvania, dancing alongside to his father’s Darin data in his mother’s pumps. Elsewhere, he’s additionally mentioned how a short run performing Darin’s songs on the 92nd Road Y in 2018 magnified his curiosity within the singer, marking the origin level of the present, since developed with Alex Timbers. That Groff would discover a lot to narrate to in Darin is, on the floor degree, fairly incongruous, although with time and Groff’s relentless and fedora-forward dedication to the bit, all of it begins to make sense. Darin was an Italian-American playboy identified for ditties like “Dream Lover” and “Mack the Knife” and his messy marriage to Sandra Dee. Groff is a homosexual star of musical theater (in addition to tv like Glee, Trying, and Mindhunter, which does get a shoutout, and movies like Frozen and Matrix: Resurrections). However his profession did have an analogous rocket-speed launch, beginning with Spring Awakening, and like Darin he does possess a voice that would’ve been cast from a steel in a fantasy novel, like Mithril or Orichalcrum. However extra crucially, he professes to attach deeply to Darin’s sense of feeling at dwelling solely whereas performing. Even when Jonathan Groff didn’t let you know himself within the prologue, Simply in Time would make it clear. In Timbers’s staging, Circle within the Sq. (referred to in-show as “the basement of Depraved”) has been remodeled right into a Nineteen Sixties nightclub, with premium-priced desk seating obtainable within the splish-splash zone (sure, there’s additionally a joke about spit). Groff is undeniably nice at bending a crowd round his little finger, and he’s working with an viewers that’s delighted to be pandered to. He spends a lot of the present weaving by means of that crowd and traipsing up the aisles and again to search out individuals to flirt and dance with, like a Labrador licking his method by means of a maze searching for treats. How may you deny this man the adulation he craves?
Groff’s enthusiasm does a number of work towards carrying Simply in Time by means of the backstory homework, however in any other case the present accedes to the usual beats of a bio-musical. The e-book, by Warren Leight and Isaac Oliver, is peppered with hoary one liners—we’re heavy on New Jersey jokes right here—that match the throwback tone of the night. Bobby, born Walden Robert Cassotto, grows up in Higher Manhattan with a Copa-obsessed mom (a stately Michele Pawk) and bothersome sister (Emily Bergl), woos a younger Connie Francis (Gracie Lawrence) whereas attempting to launch a songwriting profession, after which results in entrance of the microphone himself. Although the trajectory is acquainted, Timbers speeds the motion alongside by having Groff transition between scenes by snapping his fingers, which triggers an identical shift in Justin Townsend’s lighting. A trio of dancing and back-up singing “sirens” performed by Valeria Yamin, Christine Cornish, and Julia Grondin, additionally path Groff’s Darin all through the motion and maintain popping their heads by means of in random nooks and crannies in Derek McLane’s blindingly chromed set. Shannon Lewis’s choreography retains them in ceaseless movement, and I had visions of them sprinting round backstage to hit their marks, grabbing rubber-ducky props for the “Splish Splash” sequence alongside the way in which.
Timbers isn’t a low-key director, and although that is fluffy materials, he’s energized by a showy star and riffing on the sorts of tips he’s achieved in Right here Lies Love and elsewhere. However although the movement is well-engineered, the cliches do accumulate like sediment within the plumbing. By the top of Act One, Darin’s arguing along with his controlling bosses on the file label who gained’t let him file the music he needs (in an inversion of the standard trope, they need him to do rock and roll whereas he needs to stay to requirements). A lot of Act Two, then, will get slowed down in Darin’s sad marriage to Sandra Dee (Erika Henningsen, late of Imply Women). Henningsen is appropriately charming however brittle, however the present doesn’t have a lot oxygen to spare for anybody besides Darin, and she or he rapidly turns into yet one more admirer who loves him from afar however simply can’t perceive him. Solely Lawrence, arriving on Broadway after The Intercourse Lives of School Women, is ready to briefly wrench the present’s middle of gravity away from Groff, and solely as a result of her belt is so full it bursts by means of the theater like Alice increasing previous the scale of a home in Wonderland.
In any other case, the main target snaps proper again to Darin—or to Groff as Darin, or Darin as a method of understanding Groff. The 2 personages blur in Simply in Occasions’s second act, the place Darin begins pushing the individuals round him away as a result of they simply don’t perceive his must carry out on a regular basis. After a short sojourn to Huge Sur to search out himself (very Redwood of him) and a few household revelations, Darin returns to the Copa for a collection of performances close to the top of his life, ignoring reminders of his bodily frailty. For a present that presents as a crowd-pleaser, Simply in Time will get darkish. Timbers levels the sequence prefer it’s All That Jazz, with Groff seducing and swaying in a single second after which gasping for air with a thudding heartbeat the following. The vitality verges from electrical to manic, in a method that makes you surprise Is Jonathan Groff telling us that he wish to die mid-performance? All proper, that’s an exaggeration, nevertheless it does transfer the query of what a star will get out of entertaining, and what an viewers will get out of receiving that efficiency, proper to the middle of the present, extra so than the precise biography of Darin himself. It’s like Prospero on the finish of The Tempest turning to the viewers to be, lastly, launched by their applause—if Prospero have been sporting a tuxedo and crooning “Past the Sea.” Nonetheless, as you from crimes would pardoned be, let your indulgence set him free. Cue the megamix.
Simply in Time is at Circle within the Sq..
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