Jonathan Groff: Doing Just in Time Is "My Idea of Heaven"

If Jonathan Groff wins a Tony for his magnetic, high-energy performance as singer Bobby Darin in Just in Time, he could make Broadway history, becoming the first performer to win back-to-back Tony Awards for Best Actor in a Musical.

As fans know, Groff took home the award last year for his turn as Franklin Shepard in Merrily We Roll Along. But compared to Just in Time, Sondheim is a walk in the park. Still, for this beloved Broadway veteran, the effort it takes to leave audiences spellbound is more than worth it. He can see it in their faces as he dances among them. He can hear it in their cheers. And he can feel it in his soul. It’s as rewarding an experience as anything he’s ever done.

This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

It seems like Just in Time takes a lot out of you.
I know that the show is an extreme physical workout because of how well I sleep at night. I have to do a 30-minute physical warm-up every day before I do the show. But the experience of doing the show is my idea of heaven. I am so happy while I’m doing it, and I know that it’s a workout, but it gives more than it takes. I just love doing it.

And the people in the audience are enraptured.
Bobby Darin’s magic was the way that he would connect with an audience. By all accounts, that’s what he was most known in people’s hearts for. We wanted to honor his spirit by creating that environment in the show.

I am indirectly getting the gift of a lifetime, which is the ability to connect with audience members in such a profound, intimate way. It’s a real spiritual experience. People are crying, I’m touching their shoulders, I’m dancing with people. It’s really unlike anything I’ve ever experienced.

It’s a real personalized experience for you as a performer, from the spit warning at the beginning — 
Yep, the trigger warning of the spit.

How did that whole thing come about? Not the spit part, but the fact that you’re introduced as yourself before getting into character?
When we were in the early years — we’ve been working on it for eight years — I asked for it. In all the research that I was doing about Bobby Darin, it said that anything could happen any given night. There was this energy: he was really present as a performer. I felt like I’d like to start the show as myself to remove the artifice of the character and create that invisible thread between performer and audience member in the purest way.

I wanted the audience to feel like they could be themselves; not like they were extras in the Copa in the 1950s, but that we were all here in — we’re calling it the basement of Wicked. We’re all here in the basement of Wicked, and now let’s go on this journey together. The dream was to not just tell Bobby Darin’s story like a bio-musical, but to also, and maybe even more importantly, evoke the spirit of who he was by capturing that in-the-moment thing. By the starting the show as myself, we locate everyone in the present moment.

Does the way it lives inside you make it an easier lift than something like Merrily We Roll Along, which we were talking about this time last year?
It’s interesting. The gift of Merrily is that we all got to share it. We [Groff, Lindsay Mendez, and Daniel Radcliffe] did all of the press together. The three of us were sharing the load in a way that’s different this time around.

Because it’s all on you.
And singing Sondheim, there’s a kind of precision and a rigor of brain power. It’s like working different muscles. Merrily is a musical, but in a lot of ways, it’s also a play. There are long scenes. With Just in Time, I feel like I’m flying. There’s a great energy and inertia. The dancing and the physical requirements are what makes this one more challenging. But Sondheim is its own ball of wax. It’s like apples and oranges.