Just in Time review: Jonathan Groff parties like its 1965 in stellar Bobby Darin musical
Two hours and 20 minutes, with one intermission.At the Circle in the Square Theatre, 235 West 50th Street.That a musical about the too-short life of Bobby Darin, the 1950s and ‘60s crooner who notched a string of hits before dying young at 37, would turn out to be one of the most wondrous of the season was not on my Broadway bingo card.He wasn’t a Michael Jackson or a Tina Turner.
And even though Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons came shortly after him, their show “Jersey Boys” feels like a Broadway of a bygone era.But director Alex Timbers and his irrepressible star Jonathan Groff have made magic with “Just in Time,” which opened Saturday night at the Circle in the Square Theatre.For a little over two hours, there’s nowhere you’d rather be than at this dazzling dream of a New York that truly never slept, presided over by a Harlem-born singer whose output was so rich and rapid-fire that the man must have been fueled by the dire prognosis he received as a child: Darin wasn’t supposed to live past 16.“Just in Time” is a wallop of joy, though.And while it doesn’t shy away from Darin’s heart struggles, anatomically and romantically, the musical is never gloomy.What’s astounding is how the show manages to be, at once, both jukebox retro and to-the-minute fresh. Too often, onstage musician biographies are tethered to and limited by twitch-perfect impersonations and the same old scene-song-scene-song formula.
They’re judged, clinically, like Madame Tussauds wax replicas.What Timbers, Groff and designer Derek McLane do instead is conjure the electricity of a late, boisterous night at the Copacabana. The audience is situated in a sumptuously imagined, sparkling silver nightclub with multiple stages and a brilliant band in back.Groff spiritedly darts around the room, jumping on tables and dancing with ticket-buyers like the consummate host.
The actor, bursting with charisma, sweeps away the old radio static from Darin’s classics like...