Jonathan Groff as Bobby Darin in ‘Just in Time’: Grit, Spit & Hits

“It’s kind of like being in a long-term relationship,” Jonathan Groff muses of portraying the late Bobby Darin in the Tony-nominated musical Just in Time. “Is this working? Is this not working? Should we continue what’s happening here? My love, admiration, respect and passion for Bobby continues to deepen. The way that he lived the 37 years of his life, he’s a never-ending source of inspiration.”

Hot off his Tony win for Merrily We Roll Along in 2024, Groff returned to Broadway in April as the Grammy-winning, Billboard Hot 100-topping pop chameleon behind hits like “Mack the Knife,” “Beyond the Sea” and “Dream Lover.” While the show has found a home at the Circle in the Square Theatre for the past six months, the germ of this project began to take shape much earlier, in 2017, born out of a kinship Groff felt with the late singer. “He just innately had a real old-school showbiz thing that I personally relate to,” Groff explains Billboard.

You might have to squint, but similarities exist: Like Darin, Groff is a student of the Great American Songbook – and living proof that in the right hands and in the right setting, old songs can be as electric today as they’ve ever been. Like Darin, Groff enjoyed a mainstream breakthrough singing featherweight pop to a youth audience (was Glee his “Splish Splash?”) before quickly demonstrating he could do so much more to the wider world. And like Darin, who played to cross-generational crowds during his lifetime, Groff is packing seats with everyone from kids (some wearing “I love Jesse St. James” shirts) to fellow Millennials to 80-year-olds who caught the real Darin onstage when they were young.

Darin was both a songwriter and an interpreter, which means the musical palette of Just in Time is expansive. There’s a world of difference between the novelty rock of “Splish Splash” and the swinging, murderous “Mack the Knife,” but it’s all sonically unified thanks to a tight, expert band of pros led by music supervisor and arranger Andrew Resnick, who ensures that Just in Time feels less like Broadway and more like a Las Vegas residency from the Rat Pack era.

“There’s no electronics — we wanted it to feel like no matter what, a live band was playing,” Resnick says. Working with director Alex Timbers, Resnick – who has been with the project since its 2017 genesis at the 92nd Street Y – helped determine which songs would be deployed as storytelling devices and which ones as jaw-dropping showcases. “Mack the Knife,” the Brecht/Weill tune from 1928’s The Threepenny Opera that Darin took to the top of the Hot 100 for nine weeks in 1959, is decidedly the latter: “66 years later, it swings just as hard,” Resnick says.

“Andrew really is one of those music directors that listens to your voice and shapes an arrangement to your talents and your vibes specifically,” says Gracie Lawrence, who earned a Tony nom for her portrayal of Connie Francis in the show (she recently left the production to focus on her sibling-duo band Lawrence). To that end, Resnick added a key change moment for Lawrence in Francis’ signature hit, “Who’s Sorry Now.” “I think it was such a smart story idea to have a show-stopping moment in Connie’s first scene, so that we leave feeling like we’ve established that she’s an important person musically to Bobby and vice versa. Andrew and Alex’s choices were so story driven, it doesn’t feel superfluous,” Lawrence says.

Prior to Francis’ death on July 16 at 87, the pop legend – the last living person to be portrayed in this musical — sent Lawrence and Groff signed photographs as gifts on the show’s opening night (April 26). Lawrence said the first show after her death was “all the more real,” and a reminder that “we have such a responsibility to do right by these people and share their intense love of performing. It made me reflect on how lucky I am to have this job.”

Groff and Lawrence aren’t the only ones portraying old-school icons. Erika Henningsen took on the role of cinema legend Sandra Dee, who was married to Darin from 1960-67, for the musical (her run with the show wrapped just last week). Intent on delivering a performance that didn’t “become scenery or just a plot line, but a fully fleshed woman,” Henningsen focused on “the true woman inside the very girlish doll the studios made her out to be,” she says. “I come out and look like a cupcake… but want people to know the Sandra who become an adult much sooner than most people do.”

Having grown up listening to Groff on the Spring Awakening cast album, Henningsen is thrilled to be immortalized alongside him on the Just in Time cast album (out now on Atlantic — Darin’s longtime label, fittingly). She hopes this cast album serves as a “beautiful gateway drug” to the era and the “grit that Bobby Darin has on his recordings.”

The grit and gusto that Groff brought to the cast album was hard-earned. He went into the studio the week after the 2025 Tony Awards, “bone-tired” on a Sunday night after doing his eighth show of the week. Not that you’d know from listening to the recording. “There was something really magical in the air from the first downbeat that sustained through the all the next day on Monday. It didn’t feel stressful. It didn’t feel tired,” Groff says wonderingly. (“Even one of the A&R people at Atlantic was like, I’ve never seen a session be that stress free,” Resnick said separately.) “Bobby had such a relationship with his band members through the years, and I’ve never had a relationship with a band like this,” Groff says.

When the final recording wrapped on the 21-song cast album, Groff – who at this point has been working on this project for years — burst into tears, exclaiming, “Who needs therapy?”

“Doing eight shows a week is probably the best practice for how you want to sing the song in the official version of it,” Lawrence points out. “Particularly with Jonathan, every nuance in his voice, every growl and color comes out,” Henningsen raves of the recordings.

“This is an album that you can play front to back and just lose yourself in the experience of these really fun, joyful songs that this one man really helped bring into the world,” Resnick says. “I hope we’ve honored (Darin) in a way that he would be proud.”

Spit Takes: A Just in Time Sidebar

Early in the show, Groff warns audiences members sitting close to the stage that they’re in the splish-splash zone – he’s a wet performer, and liable to sprinkle some saliva while singing. Below, his colleagues offer first-person testimonials of that experience.

Erika Henningsen: I believe Jonathan can control it. When he’s talking to a scene partner, it’s just a leaky faucet. When he’s front and center, spotlight on him, it’s like a sprinkler system. We [duet on “Irresistible You”] and ‘irresistible’ is a salivating word, lots of Rs and Ss. One day it was just a stream. As a teenager who listened to the cast album of Spring Awakening, I have these little moments where it’s like, “You’re literally across from Jonathan Groff right now getting spit on.” Never in my 15-year-old brain was that on the horizon.

Gracie Lawrence: I don’t get spit on that much. It might be a height difference; I think it clears my head. There have been a few shows where I’ve gotten (hit), but very few. We do eight shows a week and I can think of two times where I’ve been hit directly in the eye or something like that. Because he’s the most amazing performer and loves embracing the reality of what’s happening, I wiped my face and then wiped it on his shirt. And he loved that so much. I welcome Jonathan Groff spit – I feel like I’m being baptized every time I get showered by his talent juice – but it doesn’t happen that often because he’s like 5’11” or something.

Andrew Resnick: There are a few songs where I go off stage and he plays the piano. He learned how to play the piano specifically for this. He’s singing while he’s playing, and then when I return to the piano, there are keys covered in spit. Also, oftentimes he is sucking on a Halls cough drop, a cherry cough drop, so the spit is tinged with red when I come back, which makes it very easy to see in the light. I often have to bring tissues with me to wipe down the keys because otherwise my hands are covered in his saliva. But whatever makes the magic work.

Jonathan Groff: They released a video on YouTube of us performing “This Could Be the Start of Something Big” [in the studio]. I’ve done sex scenes on TV shows before, but I cannot believe… like, my nipples are hard in this video, I’m spitting all over the microphone. I was like, “They released this thing? This is the most pornographic video that has ever been released of me.” I know I’m feeling it while I’m doing it, but I’m not thinking of how it’s coming across visually. But because they recorded it and put it out in the world, I can say I was lit up. You know, Bobby Darin used to — apparently, rumor has it — wear a condom on stage in case he ejaculated while he performed. And so I’m always trying to bring that energy.