The Woman Behind Jonathan Groff’s Dance Moves

Before her foray into choreography, Shannon Lewis spent 25 years as a dancer, including performing in 10 Broadway musicals.

This year, for the first time in her career, she got to sit in the audience on the Great White Way and watch her work play out on stage.

“As a performer, I didn’t get to do that. I didn’t get to feel all the excitement,” she said.

Although her impressive résumé includes working for the film unit of Saturday Night Live, where she is responsible for choreographing its digital shorts and music videos, she never choreographed for a Broadway show until Just in Time, which opened at Circle in the Square Theatre in April.

The show stars Jonathan Groff as Bobby Darin, and Lewis got to choreograph to Darin’s chart-topping songs, such as “Splish Splash” and “Mack the Knife.”

At the request of Groff, who earned a Tony nod for his portrayal of the late singer-songwriter, Lewis spent 10 weeks training him to dance eight times a week on stage.

“He wanted to do it well, and he wanted to do it right. And he knew that he didn’t really understand what it took because dancing on Broadway is kind of like being in the Olympics,” she said.

A native of Toronto, Lewis was “plucked out of obscurity” as a teenager by Tony-winning choreographer Susan Stroman and cast in Broadway’s Crazy for You. She moved to Manhattan in 1994 for the role.

After spending two and half decades dancing, she began “itching to be creative in a different way,” and started pursuing opportunities in choreography.

“It just feels like a continuation of what I’ve been doing—it all kind of goes together,” said Lewis, who lives in Morningside Heights with her husband, Broadway actor Marc Kudisch.

“When the storytelling is done and the performers are bowing, it really turns into like a joy-bomb concert of Bobby Darin music. Every character gets to sing, and everyone’s dancing, and everyone in the whole theater stands up,” she said.

You spent 10 weeks working with Jonathan before the show opened. How did that come about?

He said, “Look, I’ve never done a show that dances this much and I’ve always wanted to do it. What would you recommend?” And I was, like, “Do you really want to know? Because it’s kind of a lot.” And he said, “I want to know.” So we devised this plan to do 10 weeks of private training, where I would really start from a very basic place and give him the foundation of dance warm-up and technique. Then we started talking about style, and then we started talking about musicality and everything.

How does he sing so perfectly while dancing and not get out of breath?

It’s talent, obviously—not everyone can do it. And then once you have the talent, you have to hone it and you have to start to get your stamina. We take a long time, we rehearse a long time, full-out every day, because you have to build the stamina of the breath control and the ability to dance eight times a week like that. . . . I think people take it for granted especially when you’re watching something all day on your phone on YouTube or whatever, it’s kind of removed. But when you’re in the theater, especially our theater with our immersive design where you are within the show and you’re seeing the sweat fly off of Jonathan’s head, you’re really feeling the effort that’s put in.

Is Jonathan as nice as he seems?

He’s actually nicer. He’s nicer and better. I’m trying to think of someone else I can say that about. He truly is this kindhearted, joyful, and very-excited-by-life person, but he’s also a beast of the stage. Make no mistake that he’s a lovely person, but he goes very deep.

How did you research Bobby Darin’s dancing?

There was a treasure trove of information that we got that is publicly available and also not publicly available. We talked to a lot of people that knew him and we did go down a YouTube rabbit hole. The Bobby Darin Estate has quite a lot of interesting videos of him early on.

He was never a trained dancer, but that era really supported all the stars of the day dancing and singing on these variety shows. Obviously, there are shows like Hullabaloo and Ed Sullivan that are very famous that we looked at. But then I also made a real point to kind of put it to the side and then create from my own point of view. I think that was really important, that Jonathan Groff isn’t Bobby Darin, he’s Jonathan Groff, and we’re paying homage and paying great respect to Bobby Darin, but we’re making it Jonathan’s Bobby Darin.

The show also features the women in Darin’s life: Connie Francis, played by Gracie Lawrence, who was nominated for a Tony for her portrayal, and Sandra Dee, played by Erika Henningsen. How did you choreograph for them?

The women of that time were owned by the studios. They were told what to do. They were told what to wear. They were told how to move. So we talked a lot about, especially with Sandra Dee, having a movement vocabulary where she’s very young when we meet her in the show and she ages a little during her storyline. She has a rocky road, and that shows up in her movement too—it becomes a little looser, a little more adult, a little bit more mature. She was this icon of American innocence, and that was placed upon her, even though she was a full human that had a very rough life; she was objectified in that way. So we talked about what that meant for her vocabulary, that physically she wasn’t really free to explore herself that way, and I think it shows up on stage. Erika Henningsen is incredible.

Same thing with Connie Francis. She’s very iconized in the beginning of our show with being on Ed Sullivan and singing very famous songs, and the movement was very specific back then. They had to wear certain necklines with their costumes. So we sort of dovetailed with all the designers on the show to tell that story.

I should also mention that we have these incredible characters named the Sirens, who were an absolute thrill for me to get a chance to develop. They are quadruple threats—singer, dancer, actor, superstars—and they play many roles in the show. They back Bobby up as singer-dancers. They also are narrators of our story.

When one thinks of choreography, they just think about the dancing. What does your role entail in addition to that?

I think it’s very successful when you can’t tell where a choreographer and director’s work starts and finishes. Basically any movement that you see on the stage or in the theater, I had something to do with. It all is part of the same storytelling tool that we’ve designed. Alex [Timbers, the show’s director] would have some ideas, I would have ideas, but it’s really up to me to physicalize it. So in our show, there’s big production numbers that are clearly choreography and dance. Then there’s times when actors are just moving to the music through the café tables or popping up from the other end of the audience and dancing down the stairs. And that is all designed by me.

Did you have a favorite song in the show to choreograph to, or is it like picking a favorite child?

It is, actually, although “Splish Splash” is really a favorite of mine because I was able to really expand it for our production. It didn’t exist in this form. The dance-break music we wrote ourselves, and I came up with this sort of really fun dance break that kind of harks back to Hullabaloo on television. In our show, you watch the progression of him come up with the song and then start getting airplay and then getting on television and then on television with dancers and a big set. In our research, we found Bobby Darin in a cartoon bathtub with his shirt off, scrubbing his own back with a back scrubber, which we were shocked by. For that time, it’s pretty risqué, actually. But in our show, we thought it would be a really good representation of what Bobby Darin was going through.

Did you have to take into account Jonathan’s spitting while he’s singing, which he’s open about?

He’s so open about it that we wrote it into the show. He’s not trying to spit on people. It just happens naturally. We knew that it was a thing that was going to happen because we’re very close to the audience. He tries his best, but yeah, he spits on people when he sings. But when you’re watching him, you realize it’s because he’s so invested in what he’s doing. So we have a little splash zone in the theater. We give everybody a little warning, but it’s not too bad. [Laughs]

To learn more about Shannon, visit www.shannonlewis.net