Who among you remembers Connie Francis? Sandra Dee? The Copa? If you’re one who does, then perhaps Just in Time, the new Bobby Darin bio/jukebox musical/nightclub act will be just your coupe of champagne. If you’re not, well, it’s a blast anyway. But there’s something missing at its heart.
I booked tickets to Just in Time — a project in development since 2018, by its star, Jonathan Groff, director Alex Timbers, and longtime musical theater maven Ted Chapin — because of my enthusiasm for Groff’s gifts and my frank curiosity about Bobby Darin, whose brief career flamed up in the years bracketed by Elvis Presley and the Beatles. That is to say, in the thick of the American Century, which for me meant between junior high and college. Born in East Harlem in 1936 and diagnosed with a weak heart after contracting rheumatic fever at an early age, Walden Robert Cassotto was given barely 16 years to live. He idolized the woman he’d been led to believe was his mother, herself a vaudeville star, Vivian “Polly” Fern Walden, beautifully played here by Michelle Pawk. Polly’s anthem, “Beyond the Sea,” a ballad translated from the French, became one of her son’s big hits. The truth of their relationship is the big reveal in the second act, contributing to Darin’s troubled later years.
Darin defied his doctors’ predictions, graduating from the Bronx High School of Science and living to age 37 before succumbing to septicemia. Between his first hit record, at 21, and his untimely demise, he was driven to seize every moment. A man in a hurry, he began as a songwriter, selling an early effort to Connie Francis (her birth name was Concetta Rosa Maria Ferrari-di Vito Franconero) while immediately falling for her, at some risk to his life — the singer’s overprotective father came after him with a gun. He then fell for young songbird Sandra Dee moments after meeting her, marrying and having a son but then leaving her several years later.
This musical, under its fabulous veneer of night-club glamour, never lets you forget that it is really about the music business.
There’s a certain meta quality about this production, which is introduced by Groff playing himself for the first five minutes and, at the end, ushered out by the chameleonic star, a native of Lancaster, Pennsylvania. An acknowledged and very “out” gay man, Groff shares with Darin an enthusiasm for nightclubs, and has built, with Chapin and Timbers, a pastiche of songs that rapidly reveals the problem at the heart of the show. It’s got 31 musical numbers, a lot of them mid-century masterworks, but only 11 of those songs are by Bobby Darin. The singer gained fame recording tunes by Kurt Weill (“Mack the Knife”), Jule Styne, Betty Comden, and Adolph Green (“Just in Time”), but Darin’s own creations that are included tend toward the wan and tedious, like “Multiplication” and other forgettable pop songs. He broke through with “Splish Splash” (an idea the script claims he got from legendary DJ Murray the K’s mother) in 1958, and the show milks the silly-sweet number for all it’s worth, including using yellow rubber duckies and a bathtub.
Darin was not afraid to venture into other genres besides the bubblegummy pop tunes of his early career, writing and recording folk and country tunes before his death, in 1973. He also explored a political career, as a buddy to Bobby Kennedy in 1968, and was devastated when his hero was assassinated. He had to fight to record the songs he loved; references to the needs and desires of managers pepper the script. Darin finally ascends to the heights of the show-biz pantheon, bouncing from label to label, winning lots of awards and making lots of money, but before the curtain falls he’s lost it all, including his wife and his life. There’s something transactional even in Darin’s relations with his nearest and dearest; leaving his family’s Manhattan digs after a visit with his cancer-ridden “mother,” he distributes Bobby Darin swag to his relatives, including monogrammed cigarette lighters.
A hundred years ago, Calvin Coolidge declared, “The business of America is business.” This musical, under its fabulous veneer of night-club glamour, never lets you forget that it is really about the music business, lionizing DJs such as Murray the K and A&R men like Ahmet Ertegun, both played with verve by Lance Roberts. Warren Leight and Isaac Oliver wrote the tight, endearing script, which kicks off with songs written by Steve Allen (“The Start of Something Big”) and the Styne/Comden/Green rouser that became the title song, “Just in Time.” The show is packed with wonderful tunes, but not the ones original to Darin; he covered a lot of dreck (“They keep having me copy all these other singers. How am I supposed to find my own sound?”). Darin wants to record “Lazy River,” and issue an album of standards. His managers are not enthusiastic; he offers to do it with his own money. He alienates a lot of managers, but he’s often right. (Darin’s “Lazy River” came out as a single in 1960.)
We spend a dazzling couple of hours in the infinitely flexible Circle in the Square theater, here designed by Derek McLane to resemble a nightclub, with elevator platforms, swooping staircases, premium-priced seating at café tables in the middle of everything, and light fixtures that float into the house. The orchestra, conducted by Andrew Resnick, sits onstage, with various sections moving in and out; at one point Groff-as-Darin takes a turn at the drum set and plays a marimba. Justin Townsend’s lighting design is one of the play’s strongest elements, and yes, it’s a problem in musical theater when you walk out humming the scenery and the lighting.
There is dancing, sure, by a game trio of back-up singers in silver dresses performing Shannon Lewis’s functional choreography, and by Groff and the adoring audience members he picks up on his strolls around the set. And there are producers: three leads and roughly 67 co-producers, providing financial support for the glamour and the glitz. Eleven actor/singers play a multitude of roles. This show will have a long and happy run on the Great White Way, where, perhaps, a few of us, old enough to remember the brilliant lyric turns and stylings of pre-Darin American standards and the passionate gyrations of post-Darin rock, will shake our heads and wonder what happened in those middle years that let so much mediocrity rise to the top. Oh, wait, yeah — television happened. ❖
Just in Time
Circle in the Square
235 West 50th Street
Elizabeth Zimmer has written about dance, theater, and books for the Village Voice and other publications since 1983. She runs writing workshops for students and professionals across the country, has studied many forms of dance, and has taught in the Hollins University MFA dance program.