Breaking Baz: Tony-Winning Star Jonathan Groff Talks Studying Sonnets For Royal Shakespeare Company Debut In All-Male ‘As You Like It’, Coming In The Fall

EXCLUSIVE: Broadway’s Jonathan Groff, currently portraying 1950s heartthrob Bobby Darin in Just in Time, is brushing up on his Shakespeare to play Rosalind in an all-male production of comedy romance As You Like It, which will mark the actor’s debut with the Royal Shakespeare Company — and with the playwright.

Groff, who won a Tony Award for his performance in Maria Friedman’s production of Stephen Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along and long has been part of Frozen’s voice cast, will join As You Like It director Daniel Evans for rehearsals in August.

Performances will begin at the RSC’s flagship Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon on September 26 through November 7.

“It’s still a little bit of shock,” Groff says some five months after Evans caught what he calls Groff’s “magnetic” performance as Darin and then offered him the lead at Stratford.

Clearly, Evans had been bowled over by Groff’s sing-and-dance pizazz at Circle in the Square in October.

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“There’s a certain kind of actor who, when they’ve done musical theater and particularly, perhaps, Sondheim, which Jonathan has, Shakespeare comes naturally. I recognize it in him, because he’s so used to what rhythm can do, what rhyme can do. He gets it,” Evans says admiringly of Groff when we meet.

“He is magnetic. And in fact, I said this to him: There’s only one other person that I’ve seen do what he does in this show, and that is Liza Minnelli at the Royal Albert Hall,” Evans says cheerfully.

“Such utter generosity towards the audience, he loves the live interactions.… You see what he gets, how he feeds the audience, how he himself is fed, and he’s quick and bright. And of course, those are qualities that Rosalind needs,” Evans explains.

As You Like It is Shakespeare at his most romantic. The likes of Peggy Ashcroft, Maggie Smith and Vanessa Redgrave all essayed Rosalind. As did Ronald Pickup in an all-male production at the National Theatre in 1967, in a version that also featured Anthony Hopkins playing the role of Audrey.

Adrian Lester famously played Rosalind in a landmark Cheek by Jowl production that Declan Donnellan directed in 1991.

When Rosalind’s uncle banishes her, she runs away with her cousin Celia to the forest of Arden, where she assumes the guise of Ganymede, a shepherd’s boy, while Celia disguises herself as Aliena, his sister. Meanwhile, Orlando, the love-struck son of a nobleman, sets out to win fair Rosalind’s heart. 

Fisayo Akinade (Goodbye June, Heartstopper, Banana & Cucumber), a prince of comic timing and an acclaimed thespian, has been cast to play Celia. 

Referring to Groff’s Rosalind, Evans notes: ”So in our production, we’ll have a man dressing up as a woman, dressing up as a man, pretending to be a woman. So it’s all kinds of gender fluidity.”

For him, Evans says that one of the main messages of the play “is that love is where it falls. It kind of doesn’t matter what you are, who you are, because actually love tops everything. It’s literally as you like it. It’s whatever you like,” he declares.

And Groff is well up for it. Evans sent the actor an email after visiting him in Just in Time, inviting him to play Rosalind. “And I wrote him back,” Groff recalls, “and the subject of the email that I wrote back to him was, ‘Holy F*cking Shit.’ That was the subject.”

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Repeating the colorful exchange, Groff says that he’s still on a high, now that he has started delving into all things Shakespeare with Evans and Patsy Rodenburg, the eminent classical voice coach and internationally renowned authority on how Shakespeare should be fully heard and understood. Last year, she was appointed emeritus director of voice by RSC co-artistic directors Daniel Evans and Tamara Harvey.

The weekly immersion into the works of the Bard began with some sonnets.  

“I’ve never done Shakespeare before, and it’s just been so inspirational and exciting, and I am amped,” says Groff.

Thus far, they’ve studied the iambic pentameter of three sonnets plus a deep dive into Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy, and next week they’re going to start getting into Rosalind.

The idea was to “just start slow and start with just some Shakespeare that wasn’t the play, just to get my mouth around the language, the rhythm, and then sort of break out into exploring the role in the play,” he explains.

I presume that his classical singing training has allowed him to capture a sonnet’s rhythm with ease.

He lets out a snort. “Well, funnily enough, I have no training. I’m not trained at all, let alone classically trained,” he says, laughing as he corrects my assumption that he was trained by the best at Juilliard. 

He says that “all of the training that I’ve had for anything, including singing and the musicals and the dancing — I mean, even Just in Time, the show I’m doing right now, Shannon Lewis, our choreographer, gave me 10 weeks of dance lessons before the first day of rehearsal so that my body was able and ready to go. And so I end up getting these kind of gifts of training, job-specific training for any given job that I’ve had. So all of my learning has been for and on the job.”

On the first Zoom with Rodenburg and Evans, the star declared himself to them “a blank slate. I am clay to be molded because I have no preconceived notion of how to do Shakespeare. I’ve seen a bunch of Shakespeare through the years, and I’ve loved it. And I’ve seen As You Like It many times actually, funnily enough. But I just have no preconceived notion of how it is to be done. So I am at the total mercy of them, and they’ve been so incredible, these two, even in these first few weeks of training and learning, I’ve learned so much already. “

After just a few sessions with Rodenburg, Groff has found himself inspired by the language they’ve been studying, and he’s noticed a difference in how he approaches a performance. “Patsy’s been allowing me to take a breath and let the language take me places without having a preconceived notion of where it’s going to take me,” he says.

Groff says that all the verse reading has benefitted his performance in Just in Time. “We’ve done about 350 performances now, it’s almost the year of doing this eight shows a week, and I’ve been able even this deep into our run, to take the things that I’ve been learning from Patsy and Daniel and take a breath and allow it to affect what I’m doing on stage every night. So it’s been a real gift,” he says “to get some fresh energy” into the part he’ll be playing in Circle In the Square until March 29.

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He’s grateful for the extra spring in his step he feels he’s gained of late because the stamina it takes to sustain “a big Broadway musical, and I sing, I think, 15 songs in this show — the sort of physical stamina that’s almost like training to run a marathon,” he says.

His comments equate with Evans’ “animal of the theater” mantle for Groff. 

“It’s my greatest passion for sure,” he readily agrees. “I can’t get enough. … There’s just something about that primal exchange between performer and audience that is endlessly fascinating and educational and inspiring.”

Until Evans sent him that email, the very idea of reciting verse “trippingly on the tongue,” as the Danish prince suggests to the traveling players in Hamlet, had never entered Groff’s mind. He does love seeing Shakespeare, though. He and his boyfriend at the time visited Stratford-upon-Avon in 2019, just to walk around and take in the sights. “And I was shook to my core. I couldn’t believe how profoundly inspired I was being in Stratford.”

On a whim, they bought tickets to see director Justin Audibert’s gender-swapped production of The Taming of the Shrew that starred Price as Petruchia and Jospeh Arkley as Katherine.

At that time, Groff had  been absent from the stage for several years due to a gig playing an FBI agent hunting serial killers in Netflix’s Mindhunter. “I hadn’t been on stage probably since Hamilton,” where he’d  replaced Brian d’Arcy James as King George when the show was playing at the Public. He then went on to originate the role on Broadway.

So overwhelmed was he from seeing the play at Stratford that he purchased a little card and wrote a fan letter thanking Claire Price for “reawakening in me, my primal need to be back on stage.”

Returning to the U.S., he promptly signed on to play Seymour in Howard Ashman and Alan Menken’s musical Little Shop of Horrors, Off Broadway, reuniting him with Michael Mayer, who’d directed him earlier in his career in Spring Awakening, which was my first time seeing him perform.

“So that was partially inspired by seeing that production in Stratford,” Groff says. 

And then when Kevin Kline came to see him in Little Shop of Horrors “he said, ’Jonathan, it’s time for Shakespeare.’ He said, ‘You’re doing Macbeth right now [in Little Shop of Horrors]. It’s time for Shakespeare.’” 

But it had just “never crossed my mind to perform it” until Evans offered him Rosalind. “And the invitation was not to do it in London, not to do it in New York, but to do it in Stratford, specifically … on that stage where I had seen that production and had such a reawakening. I am still in a bit of a state of shock about it,” he says.

Might it transfer from Stratford into the West End, I ask? That’s not where his focus is, he responds.

Groff says that Evans also wondered whether he might do it somewhere else. “And I was like, “Well, let me just try and get it right here before I think about anything else.’ So that’s where my focus is.”

And what about Just in Time, does he have any thoughts about recreating Bobby Darin in London? 

“That would be amazing,” he trills.

“I would totally be open to that. I love doing it so much,” he adds.

What’s his favorite of Shakespeare’s sonnets so far, I wondered?

Well, “it’s not the last one we did,” he says referring to Sonnet 129. ”That one was about lust … really f*cking intense,” he insists.

The intonation in his voice switches as he begins to recite Sonnet 116: 

“‘Let me not to the marriage of true minds / Admit impediments; love is not love.’”

The energy in that line, he feels, “is so appropriate for stepping on a stage,” which he describes as “this very kind of sacred and vulnerable space. Vulnerable, both for the performer coming out but also for the audience.”

He says that he’s been carrying “the purity” of the poetry “with me a lot the last couple of days.”

Clearly, all the world’s a stage for Jonathan Groff.

“Holy. F*cking. Shit,” he cries again as he bids me farewell.

*****

As You Like It is part of the RSC’s 2026-27 season that’s being announced today.

The RSC’s artistic chiefs cleverly have booked Harriet Walter to return to Stratford to play Brutus in a revival of Phyllida Lloyd’s acclaimed all-female Julius Caesar.

Lloyd originated her version of Julius Caesar, part of a trilogy of plays, at the Donmar Warehouse Theatre 14 years ago, then run by Josie Rourke and Kate Pakenham. The plays are performed by thespians portraying female prisoners who choose to perform the trilogy to express their belief in freedom and justice.

The production will tour schools in England for five weeks from September 21.

It will play Stratford’s The Other Place from November 5-28.

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Another highlight is Game of Thrones: The Mad King, a new play based on the novels of George R.R. Martin, adapted by Duncan MacMillan and directed by Dominic Cooke. As Deadline reported recently, the story is a prequel that begins several years before the events in HBOs Game of Thrones . 

The production is co-produced with Simon Painter,Tim Lawson, Mark Manuel, Warner Bros.Theatre Ventures, HBO and Sir Leonard Blavatnik and Danny Cohen for Access Entertainment. The production will open this summer in Stratford in the Royal Shakespeare Theatre. Dates are TBA.

Also in the season is Nina Raine’s two-part adaptation of George Eliot’s Middlemarch, directed by Jeremy Herrin. Part 1 plays from October 1, with Part 2 from October 10, running through January 16. 

It strikes me that the RSC is attempting to reach audiences who might feel that the RSC isn’t for them, while also catering to its loyal regulars. There’s a breathtaking array of choice here that’s likely to work across the board.