Just in Time
Opening Night: April 26, 2025
Theater: Circle in the Square
Website: justintimebroadway.com
Look out, Jonathan’s back! Tony Award® winner Jonathan Groff (Merrily We Roll Along, Hamilton) returns to Broadway this spring as Bobby Darin, the legendary singer whose short but remarkable life took him from teen idol to global sensation. Developed and directed by Tony Award winner Alex Timbers (Moulin Rouge, Beetlejuice), Just In Time is an electrifying new musical that will transport audiences into an intimate nightclub complete with a live band, a stellar ensemble cast, and iconic Bobby Darin hits including “Beyond the Sea,” “Mack the Knife,” “Splish Splash,” and “Dream Lover.” Discover the man behind the music – a once-in-a-lifetime talent who knew his time was limited and was determined to make a splash before it was too late.
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April 26, 2025
Yet Groff is still swimming, right to the end. Dismayed as I was to endure so much else, I have to admit he’s giving one of Broadway’s best performances.
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April 27, 2025
But the manner in which “Just in Time” unfolds is mercilessly predictable, so the beats rarely surprise; we feel every snap coming. For what it’s worth, Groff, Lawrence and Henningsen don’t seem to mind — they’re having a howling good time slipping into these characters’ shoes.
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April 26, 2025
With a terrific full band right on stage the entire time, we are transported to the streets of East Harlem, Vegas, and even Portofino thanks to versatile nightclub scenic design by Derek McLane. I task you with finding a leading man today with half the charisma that Jonathan Groff possesses. He brings not just the story, but the very soul of Bobby Darin to life. If there is one musical to see this season, you might as well grab your bathing suit and come Splish Splash in the basement of Wicked – you won’t be disappointed.
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April 26, 2025
Naturally, though, it’s Groff’s energy and charisma that anchor Just in Time. The brilliance of the show’s opening is that, by creating a staged-concert atmosphere from the start, it frees us from the need to compare him to Darin and instead foregrounds Groff’s own passion for telling his story. Groff even concludes the evening with an unexpectedly eloquent tribute to the evanescent yet transcendent power of theater. How rare it is for a jukebox bio-musical to feel like it comes genuinely from the heart.
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April 26, 2025
Director Alex Timbers and the book writers fail to go beyond the concert conceit, and never give us a real portrait of Darin or leave us with a clear idea of what we are supposed to think of him. The musical offers us brief glimpses into how poorly he treated many of the people in life, particularly women. Groff and the team obviously love him and his work, but are we meant to?
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April 26, 2025
Groff, assisted by a terrific trio of singer-dancers (Christine Cornish, Julia Grondin, Valeria Yamin) who back him up through the years and many, many fashions and dance styles, is tireless and captivating throughout the show. Long known for the copious amounts of spit and sweat he releases during a performance – he jokingly acknowledges his “wetness” early in the show – Groff embodies the give-it-all stage style embodied by Minnelli in her prime, and with Just In Time we watch as, song by song and dance by dance, a stage performer of the highest order blossoms.
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April 26, 2025
When Groff is singing and dancing (stunning choreography by Shannon Lewis), “Just in Time” absolutely dazzles. It doesn’t matter if what’s happening on stage ever makes you think of Bobby Darin. But Groff doesn’t always sing and dance, and when he or anybody else stops to recite dialogue from Leight and Oliver’s book, “Just in Time” simply deadens. Since Timbers also receives a “developed by” credit here, he should have developed a completely different book.
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April 26, 2025
Groff is undeniably great at bending a crowd around his little finger, and he’s working with an audience that’s delighted to be pandered to. He spends much of the show weaving through that crowd and traipsing up the aisles and back to find people to flirt and dance with, like a Labrador licking his way through a maze in search of treats. How could you deny this guy the adulation he craves?
READ THE REVIEWApril 26, 2025
The melding of personas successfully transmutes Groff’s exceptional charisma and earned goodwill into the tale of a past celebrity most of the audience could not identify via photo. But it also makes suspension of disbelief an impossible hurdle; it is difficult with such an emphasis on the performer’s magnetism, to invest in the details of the subject’s actual life, which are occasionally tossed off like Wikipedia entries
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April 26, 2025
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 “Mack the Knife,” “Dream Lover” and “Beyond the Sea” with his silky tenor.
READ THE REVIEWApril 26, 2025
When Just In Time does conclude, it goes out with an exuberant bang, and though the vapor forms, it’s clear that this is a show guaranteed to linger… whether it be the toe-tapping tunes, the memory of Groff’s enthralling presence, or a certain thought, sure to cross your mind on the way out: “When can I see it again?”
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April 26, 2025
The show loses momentum, indeed becomes a lethargic drag, with its unfocused, dull examination of the marriage of Darin and Dee. Here, the show scratches the surface of a darker side to Darin—a cruel and thoughtless side—but it doesn’t dwell there.
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April 26, 2025
Just in Time is a helluva good time at the theater. It’s not just that, but that’s the baseline. Staged in a dazzling rush by Alex Timbers, the show summons the spirit of a 1960s concert at the Copacabana by the pop crooner Bobby Darin—as reincarnated by one of Broadway’s most winsome leading men, the radiant sweetie Jonathan Groff, who gives the performance his considerable all. You laugh, you smile, your heart breaks a little, you swing along with the brassy band, and you’re so well diverted and amused that you may not even notice when the ride you’re on takes a few unconventional turns.
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April 26, 2025
“Just in Time” travels the familiar narrative road of an artist’s rise and fall, but immersive swank and charming personality set this bio-musical apart from even its most successful predecessors. (“Jersey Boys,” watch your tail.) Staged nightclub-style by director Alex Timbers — with seating on three sides plus cabaret two-tops down front — the production fizzes with class and delight like a coupe of champagne. That warm and heady feeling? It’s secondhand intoxication from the joy Groff radiates in his element.
READ THE REVIEWApril 26, 2025
With an exuberant band, Just in Time rides easy on Groff’s waves of showman charisma while paying tribute to the era-specific music and other singers, especially the women in Darin’s life who inspired his performance, starting with Michele Pawk as a parental figure with a vaudevillian past. The book seamlessly weaves in how other stars like Connie Francis (a blazing, must-see Gracie Lawrence) and Sandra Dee (a commanding Erika Henningsen), the latter of whom witnessed his fallible humanity, were integral to his life.
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For Bobby Darin fans, “Just in Time” delivers his hits: “Beyond the Sea,” “Dream Lover,” “Rock Island Line,” “Queen of the Hop,” “Up a Lazy River,” “If I Were A Carpenter,” and of course “Mack the Knife.” But it’s fans of Jonathan Groff who are best served by the show – and those who might discover Groff at the same time as Darin.
READ THE REVIEWApril 26, 2025
But it all comes back to Groff. Buoyed by Andrew Resnick and Michael Thurber’s kicky orchestrations, his renditions of Darin’s standards—the brassy, hard-edged “Mack the Knife,” with those insistent key changes, and the absolutely manic, horn-crazed “Once in a Lifetime”—are thrilling. The show is a testament to one man’s pure, unabashed love of performing. Make that two men.
READ THE REVIEWApril 26, 2025
It’s the staging and the star’s performance that truly elevate the evening, however. Alex Timbers’ limber, imaginative direction uses the space fantastically, with a large stage at one end of the theater providing enough room for a terrific big band, another smaller one at the opposite side for more intimate interludes, and cabaret tables in the middle. Groff works the room like nobody’s business, going from one end to the other, wandering into the aisles, and, at one point, standing atop one of the small tables which magically starts spinning.
READ THE REVIEWApril 26, 2025
Watch out, Hugh Jackman! Jonathan Groff is coming for your crown as Broadway’s greatest showman. And he’s got the slickest attraction in town as ammo.
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