Bobby Darin was a major pop star … a singer, dancer, musician, and an Oscar nominee.He was the entertainer who did it all, except Broadway.
Until now!Tony Award-winner Jonathan Groff ("Merrily We Roll Along") plays the icon of the late 1950s and '60s in the musical "Just in Time." "He was at the height of his powers, when he was on the floor of a nightclub with the audience in the palm of his hand," said Groff.For Darin, a live audience was oxygen.
So, too, for Groff: "You can feel this vibration between performer and audience member.[It's], to me, the most essential thing to ignite in the telling of his story."It's taken seven years and a whole lot of sweat to bring the show to Broadway.
The casting of Groff – beloved for his roles on stage, and as Kristoff in the "Frozen" movies – might not seem obvious.Groff grew up on a horse farm in Pennsylvania Mennonite country; Darin was a scrappy Italian kid from the Bronx.I asked Groff to whom he liked listening when he was growing up.
"I am in fourth or fifth grade, on the computer or Nintendo in the basement, blasting Ethel Merman, 'Annie Get Your Gun,'" he laughed."So, this is the 1990s, probably? And you're playing something from the 1940s?" "Exactly!"Likewise, Bobby Darin was an old soul, says his son, Dodd Darin."He admired, he loved, he respected the old timers.
He loved that era of show business.That's what he related to."That may have had something to do with the woman who raised him: "Polly, his mother, was an old vaudevillian," said Dodd.
"And she nurtured him and said, 'You can't play stickball in the street.And you can't roughhouse with kids' ('cause he was frail and sickly).
'But you can learn to sing.You can learn to dance.
You can learn to play piano.' And it opened a whole world.""Frail and sickly" was no exaggeration.Born Walden Robert Cassotto, Darin suffered several bouts of rheumatic fever as a child, permanently damaging his heart.
When he was a boy, he overheard a family do...