Leading Just In Time, Broadway's hit Bobby Darin musical, is not for the faint of heart. 

For most bio-jukebox musicals, the task is clearly defined from the very first audition: the leading player must adequately imitate the person the show has been built to honor, live up to the love audiences already have for the material, and embody the individual for whom their affection lies.

For Just In Time, the challenge is reversed: stripped bare of fourth-wall artifice and the traditional trappings of a bio-jukebox show, the leading player isn't asked to disappear into Bobby Darin. Instead, their task is to make the audience fall head over heels in love with them, the performer, just as Darin courted his audience. It is an intensely difficult task, requiring a leading player with boundless charm, open vulnerability, and the talent to captivate every eye in the room. 

Built around the megawatt talent of Jonathan Groff from the very beginning, it seemed (since the show's opening last spring) that he was the irreplaceable glue that kept the entire production together. Without him, no one knew what Just In Time would even be; the show even opens with an announcer saying: "Ladies and Gentlemen, please welcome to the stage, Jonathan Groff!"

Enter Matt Magnusson, Groff's standby and the productions effusively charismatic ace in the hole. After nine months of patiently waiting for a moment that could have never come, Magnusson is now enjoying his first week of performances as Bobby Darin, stepping in for Groff while the actor is on vacation January 13–18.

"I knew when I took this job that there were no guarantees," Magnusson shared with Playbill prior to beginning his week of performances. "I knew that Groff very famously doesn't call out, because I'm friends with his standby from Merrily We Roll Along [Corey Mach]. On that show, Jonathan never called out until he eventually took a vacation about a year into it. But there were no guarantees that he'd do the same thing for me."

For nine months, Magnusson has been the show's ever-reliable reserve. As the standby, he has represented the show at publicity events and rehearsed new cast members in private before handing them off to Groff for their public debut. But the majority of his time has been spent in stasis, ever-ready to go on without any promise of actually performing. "I sing along pretty much every night, just to keep my vocal stamina up. The front of house team, all the ushers and the bartenders, cheer me on in my little corner of the lobby, where I have enough space to dance along to the monitor. They've been getting a second show, just for them, for months now."

While Groff's relentless commitment to his craft is treasured by his audience, it puts his covers in a difficult position: If they're going on without advance notice, something has to be deeply wrong. And chances are, they haven't run the show in front of an audience in months, if ever, when that happens.

Magnusson unexpectedly made his Darin debut November 28, the day after Groff and the rest of the company performed on the Thanksgiving Day Parade. While only partially through Act One of the matinee performance, Groff found himself unable to continue. "It was a day like any other," Magnusson states dramatically before dropping the act, laughing.

"We showed up to the theatre, the show started, and my dressing room partner (John Treacy Egan) and I, we could hear it over the monitor. We could kind of hear that something was going on with Jonathan. But hey, it's Jonathan. He has a voice of steel. And my thinking was, 'Well, he's just gonna warm up into it today. He might be sick a little bit, but as the show goes on, he'll warm up into it. He'll be fine, and he'll do the show, just how he's been doing the show for nine months straight.'" 

But then, Groff stopped the show. Magnusson leans forward, suddenly serious. "I got ready in a blur, and man, Groff was being such a generous actor to give me time. He teed me up to the audience as he passed the baton to me: He looked out at that sold-out crowd that was there to see him, and he said, 'Matt Magnusson is going to come out. Please stay. The cast is amazing. The show is amazing. But I'm no longer able to do it. I very much wanted to, and that's my truth, but I can't do it today. But Matt can.' And he apologized and left, and as he went into his dressing room, we shared this look. He was kind of silently saying 'I'm sorry,' while I was trying to reassure him, 'Don't worry. I got your back, man, don't worry. You don't have to apologize to me.'"

Magnusson leans back again, his smile returning. "In hindsight, I really think it was the best possible way to go on after all that time, as unfortunate as it was that he was sick. After nine months of waiting, I didn't have time to overthink things. When you're thrown on like that, you don't have any time to worry, and you have this freedom that comes with knowing, 'Well, if I mess up, the audience will understand that this was crazy.'"

He completed the matinee and went on again that evening. Groff returned the next day, rehabilitated after a day of rest. Magnusson returned to the wings, turning his focus back to achieving "swingo" (going on for every auxiliary role he covers in the show). So far, he has checked off the roles of Don Kirshner, Giorgio, and Angelo, while continuing to wait for his opportunity to perform the Murray the K, Ahmet Ertegun, Charlie Maffia, and Steve Blauner tracks. All the while, Darin danced in the back of his mind: "Going on for Kirshner numbed the itch a bit, but when Jonathan announced his vacation, I started praying."

"Weeks went by, and nobody was telling me anything, and when you've done this long enough..." He shrugs. "I've been around the business long enough doing other shows, and my wife [Alison Luff] is on her ninth Broadway show. So I understand that this is a business, and that if a star calls out for a significant length of time, the producers are going to look for someone who's going to sell the tickets. It's not personal, it's just the way the business is. And that was where my head was at, when I wasn't hearing [anything] right away.."

Magnusson bided his time, and in the end, the week was his, wholesale.

Just In Time has rolled out the navy carpet for Magnusson, printing special Playbills with his name emblazoned throughout the interior, tweaking a handful of vocal arrangements to suit his baritenor range, and even rewriting portions of the show to reflect his own life experiences.

"I sat down with Isaac [Oliver, one of the show's book writers], and it was basically like a therapy session. I told him all about my upbringing and my relationship to Bobby Darin's songs, and he took it and gave me my own version of the show's opening. I get to talk about how I first heard these songs with my Mimi and Poppy at their house, and how in my Mimi's later years, we'd listen to 'Dream Lover' and she told my sister, 'You know, I'd rather dream alone. I don't need anybody, I'd rather dream alone.' That's a very specific memory I have of a Bobby Darin song, and a memory of my grandmother I hold very close."

Magnusson pauses, lingering on the cherished memory before continuing. "He also gave me the freedom to come up with my own stuff as I go. I just have to throw it at him and he'll approve it. They're really letting me make the role mine." In tailoring the show to himself, it's made the performer appreciate what's so unique about Just in Time, especially in comparison to other jukebox musicals—it's not just about Bobby Darin or Jonathan Groff.

"It's not just another jukebox musical where it's someone doing an impersonation, and fitting into a very specific mold. This show is really tailored to the individual at the center of it, allowing them to tell their story alongside Bobby's. You let the audience in, and that gets addicting very, very fast. When you have the audience in your hand, listening to you share something so personal about yourself, after years in a career pretending to be someone else ... It's a very addicting role, and once you get a little taste of it, it is something that you want to do over and over and over again."

This week also offers Magnusson an opportunity rarely afforded to the hard-working standbys, swings, and understudies that keep this industry afloat. The advance notice has made it possible for his family and friends to see him perform, including his spouse Luff, who has been busy in Massachusetts developing the new musical Wonder. "By the fate of the theatre gods, Alison doesn't have a performance on Tuesday, my first night, so she's coming with my in-laws. Our son Levi's too young to sit in the theatre, he just turned two, so he'd see me and probably try to walk onto the stage, but he'll be with me backstage. I get to have everyone together, which is everything."

With his family close by, his front of house fans cheering him on, and the support of the entire company, Magnusson is doing his best to memorize every single second of his week in the spotlight. 

"To get to Broadway was such a goal for me, my whole life, and there have been so many close calls where it was between me and another guy, and it just went the other way. Self doubt started to sink in, and I had almost gotten comfortable with believing that this wasn't going to be my route in life. And then I booked A Wonderful World [in 2024], and I did everything I could to soak up every single second of that show, because I knew it might not ever happen again." Magnusson smiles, rolling his shoulders back. "And then this show comes along, almost immediately, and it's beyond my wildest dreams ... People have been so generous with their love. It's been such a beautiful thing. I feel so, so very fortunate, and I'm going to leave everything I have on that stage this week. If this is it, I'm making it count." Hopefully for this dedicated standby, this is the start of something big.