Living the Childhood Dream
Leading Man Jonathan Groff Tells About His Spring Awakening
Whether it be a ballerina, an astronaut, or a professional baseball player, our childhood musings about our grown-up selves typically do not align with our adult identities. En route to becoming a grown-up, pasts get traded for futures—and the old pointe shoe and baseball glove lie abandoned, a misbegotten dream.
But for Spring Awakening’s leading man, Jonathan Groff, his childhood dream is alive and well. He reaffirms it every night when he grabs his hand held microphone and takes the stage at the Eugene O’Neill Theater.
“That was the moment where I was like—I’ve got to figure out what this is because it’s too exciting,” he says, smiling in reminiscence. It was during an elementary school performance of Annie Get Your Gun at the local high school in Lancaster, Pa., when Groff decided that musical theater was the one thing he desperately wanted to pursue. Still able to recall the name of the lead actress who played Annie Oakley, he recounts the proceedings of that day with genuine enthusiasm, an almost uncanny clarity to his thoughts. At the time, Groff was in fourth grade.
Now, only a little over 10 years later, Groff is on Broadway playing Melchior, Spring Awakening’s tragic hero. The story centers on Melchior and his teenage love affair with Wendla, played by actress Lea Michele. Based upon a drama written in 1891 by Frank Wedekind and with music and lyrics by Duncan Sheik and Steven Sater respectively, Spring Awakening explores topics ranging from child abuse and suicide to homosexuality and teenage abortion.
But instead of gearing up for the impending Tony awards, Groff was originally supposed to be getting ready to don his cap and gown at graduation from Carnegie Mellon in May. He decided to defer his admission for a year when he landed the role of Rolf in The Sound of Music while auditioning in New York in December of 2002. And later, when it came down to staying in Pennsylvania or moving to New York, he packed his bags for the city on Oct. 20, 2004 and began waiting tables on Oct. 21.
“The logical choice would have been to go to college, and the safe choice would have been to go to college, but I couldn’t deny what my gut was telling me,” explains Groff. “I wasn’t ready to go to school and I knew it.”
Even after living in the city for nearly three years, Groff says that when he returns to small town life, it feels as though he has never left.
“I just went home to Lancaster to do a benefit concert for this community theater I worked at a lot called the Ephrata Playhouse,” he says, holding a recent copy of his hometown paper, the Lancaster New Era, where his homecoming made front page news.
“Fans from the stage door road tripped to Ephrata, Pa. to see my benefit concert ... which was crazy! We [the cast] are lucky we have our fans, though,” he adds. “They’re great, and we love them.”
Gesturing to a wooden basket filled with fan mail and leafing through a homemade red scrapbook with his name, picture and yellow cut-out stars plastered on the cover, he says that Spring Awakening “is really a sort of word-of-mouth show.”
“The producers have said that the reviews have, of course, helped significantly to improve our audiences, but even more than that, the word-of-mouth has been so strong.”
He explains that the challenge for a show like Spring Awakening was to see if it would catch on with a younger student audience, while still getting attention from those patrons who normally frequent the theater.
“During previews when we were on Broadway in November and early December we couldn’t sell half the house,” Groff confesses. “No one really knew what to think of us, and what to expect. It was a big risk for everyone involved.”
“And this is the first time, and I think I can speak for everyone in the cast, that we’ve ever done something this huge, out of control, massive, that we’re the frontrunners of,” he says. “We’ve all taken this insane journey. These are people that I know will be in my life forever—it’s like the college experiences.”
During our conversation, his co-star Michele stopped by to chat about the Lost episodes she had just watched. Groff had hosted a Lost party for the cast over at his apartment a few nights before.
“The past three [episodes] we’ve caught up on have been really good,” she says, lingering in the doorway before disappearing into her adjacent dressing room. “I’m exhausted. Are you tired?” she asks.
“No, I’m okay,” he replies.
But Groff admits that there are days when he does feel tired or frustrated.
“But whatever is going on, you can express it in the blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,” he says, laughing. In the second act Groff leads the cast in singing one of the show’s title tunes called “Totally Fucked.” And like the monosyllabic jargon used by the teacher in Peanuts cartoons, the chorus is punctuated by the word “blah” repeated over and over as the cast jumps onto ladders and off of chairs, neon lights flashing, an electric guitar coming alive with Sheik’s inspired riffs and chords.
“I’ve really been taking advantage of that lately. Just trying to live in that [moment] and let everything go ... It’s such a release,” he says.
Between starting work on the daytime soap One Life to Live, stealing time to watch Star Wars movies, and walking the runway in Jill Stuart fashion shows, Groff finds that his daily life always comes back to the theater where he performs eight times a week. He calls it “Spring Awakening tunnel vision.”
“But you know,” he remarks, “some guy at the stage door said to me the other day that the reason he comes back to see the show over and over again is because he feels like he’s watching the beginning of 13 people’s careers. This is the springboard for everybody ... This is everyone all together for a limited piece of time, starting out.”
From an inspired fourth grader to a Broadway star at 22—his only regret seems to be that elementary school students can’t come to see the show.