فصل 24

XXIv

OF JONATHAN GROFF HIS ROYAL CHARACTER, HIS NOTABLE CAREER, HIS DRESSING ROOM DECOR &C.

“The four grandparents of the show are Sweeney Todd, Jesus Christ Superstar, Evita, and Gypsy,” says Tommy.

It was dinner break at the Richard Rodgers, where tech rehearsals were underway. The cast had seized the chance to get out of the building, since their workday was scheduled to last until midnight. The place was as deserted as a Broadway theater can be when there are only four days left before the first audience arrives. Power tools whirred; laptops clicked.

“Gypsy and Sweeney are the story of monsters,” he continues. “They’re both about somebody who has already been judged by history, but the shows still create mystery about why the monsters do what they do. Evita and Jesus Christ Superstar showed that music could lead the way”–meaning that they had started as concept albums, and were virtually sung-through, like Hamilton. “They both took mythical figures and humanized them.”

“What about Les Mis?” “That might be the grandparent that raised us. There’s a lot of Javert and Valjean in there,” he says. “Les Misérables is fundamentally about somebody who says, You have to live by these rules,’ and somebody else who says, Sometimes you have to break those rules.’ Burr’s inability to understand how Hamilton lives is one of his great obstacles of Act One. At the end of Act Two, he absorbs Hamilton’s energy, and kills him. And Hamilton acts in a way that is much more Burr-like.”

Something onstage caught Tommy’s eye. An actor who had just returned from dinner was performing a grandiose bow toward the mezzanine. He touched his heart; he looked rapt; he bowed again. It was a parody of communing with the space, or some mystical actorly crap like that.

“Groff, you are back on Broadway!” Tommy shouts to him. “Literally,” Groff replies. “There are dozens of people excited about that,” says Tommy. The joke is that 31-year-old Jonathan Groff is, by far, the show’s biggest star. In 2007, he collected a Tony nomination and the hearts of pretty much everybody who saw him for his breakout role in the rock musical Spring Awakening. He led the cast of Hair at Shakespeare in the Park a year later, and notched a few other Off-Broadway credits, but for the most part he spent his late 20s getting famous on film and TV: He played a recurring role on Glee, he supplied the voice of Kristoff in Frozen, he landed a lead role in the HBO drama Looking. The announcement that Groff would be returning to Broadway as Hamilton’s King George III, the charming sociopath who threatens and taunts the Americans, constituted big news. Many more than dozens were excited about it.

But once again, luck and good timing had to intervene. Groff was the last principal to join the company of Hamilton, and he almost didn’t join at all.

On opening night at the Public, the king had been played by Brian d’Arcy James. He stole the show, but he was already committed to another role that began in a few weeks. Lin and Tommy thought of Groff as a potential replacement. They liked his comic sensibility, his boyish impudence–what Tommy called his “King Groffrey” quality, a reference to the sadistic teenaged tyrant of Game of Thrones. But King George III is a strange role to offer to a rising young star. He sings only three variations on one song. They keep him onstage for just nine minutes.

Groff considered the offer mainly because he had gotten to know Lin when they were both breaking out in their Broadway debuts. “I thought, Yeah, I’ll go do something at the Public, mostly because I loved him. He’s a nerd, he’s a theater fan, he’s a genuinely good person.” He listened to a demo recording of “You’ll Be Back,” the king’s first song, and signed up for the show.

“And then I saw it,” he says. “And it was like–,” and here words fail him. “I was weeping, and I did not expect to be weeping. It was a transformative experience. I felt like I’d really won the lottery.”

On the day before Groff ‘s first performance at the Public, the cast held a coronation ceremony onstage. It was Brian’s idea–a generous gesture from one well-liked actor to another, both silly and heartfelt. (A garter was involved.) That likability, Tommy says, is the key to both actors’ ability to bring the role to life. “How much more interesting is it to have a king who’s going to do the most horrible things, and is The Other, and yet we love him?” When Groff was in Spring Awakening, he won Broadway.com’s Audience Choice award–three of them, actually.

Groff was happy to steal some of Brian’s choices: the king’s extreme stillness onstage, the little shoulder wag he does toward the end of “You’ll Be Back.” But he also started to play with what the song and its reprises could be. “The great thing about the song is that it’s bulletproof,” he says. “It’s always hilarious. Literally anyone could walk onstage and get laughs. You can mess with it and you still won’t mess up the whole train.”

Everybody assumed that Groff ‘s involvement in the show–the reign of King George the Third the Second, as they called him–would last for six weeks. Then he would go back to Looking, and the show would go uptown with somebody new: King George the Third the Third. But a few weeks after his reign began, HBO unexpectedly canceled Looking. And it left Groff with a dilemma: Make a yearlong commitment to play the king–“a cameo, essentially,” in his words–or resume his climb through TV and film?

What looked like a hard call from the outside really wasn’t. It was “a no-brainer,” he says. “A show like this comes along once in a generation. To be a small part of that is why I went into performing in the first place. It’s such rare air that we’re breathing.”

Eight times a week, Groff spends his nine minutes onstage–funny, seductive, scary, haughty, perplexed. Because he treats the songs as a relationship with the audience, his performance naturally varies to match whatever energy the crowd feeds him. After the curtain call, you can find him offstage right and up a flight of stairs, in the suite of dressing rooms that he shares with Lin. During tech, he devised a plan to replace his door with a beaded curtain he had found online.

“We’re making it our little nest up there,” he says. “It’s gonna get real personal.”