Theatre review: Jonathan Groff comes to London in ‘How to Succeed…’

Looking’s Jonathan Groff starred for one night only in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying at London’s Royal Festival Hall last night (May 19). Attitude’s Simon Button went along to give his verdict…

The first time I encountered Jonathan Groff he was baring his soul, and his backside, on the Broadway stage as an angry, angsty teen in Spring Awakening opposite someone named Lea Michele. That was in 2007 and the then-22-year-old was so charismatic and such a great singer that I was reaching for my Playbill going “Who is this guy?”

Three years later millions of TV viewers knew who Groff was thanks to his recurring role as cocky Vocal Adrenaline leader Jesse St James on Glee, wooing former Broadway co-star Michele’s Rachel Berry. The fact that openly gay Jonathan was playing a straight man angered Newsweek magazine writer Ramin Setoodeh, who – in what seemed like a blatant, blinkered bit of homophobia – said he was “more like your average theatre queen” who’d be a better match for Kurt.

Utter bollocks, of course, but I’d like to think Groff’s all-out-gay performance as adorable Patrick in the brilliant Looking was an F-you to Setoodeh. And I’d like to think him doing such a dazzling turn as very heterosexual J. Pierrepont Finch in How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying will help silence this nonsense debate once and for all .

Enough already; I’ve wasted more space than I meant to on it. It gets my goat, but let’s focus instead on Groff’s performance here – so charming and slyly funny it’s a shame he only got to do it for one night.

And let’s praise Hannah Waddingham (hilarious as a blonde dipstick as dim as a broken lightbulb), Clive Rowe, the ever-reliable Anna-Jane Casey and Clarke Peters, all of whom dazzled in this first London production since 1964 – although Peters relied far too heavily on the script that everyone else held in their hands but seldom consulted. Some of the supporting cast, meanwhile, mugged way too much, as if they felt the need to make up for the lack of scenery by making a look-at-me show of themselves – which I’m sure they’d have been made to rein in over time.

But there wasn’t time. Like Follies last month, this one-off performance was done as a concert. There was no scenery, just star quality to spare. Waddingham, Rowe, Casey and Peters are no strangers to West End stages but Groff was a first-timer and boy did he seize his moment.

Finch, a New York City window washer who lands a job in the mailroom of a big company and works his way up the career ladder by devious means, has been played in various revivals by Matthew Broderick, Darren Criss, Nick Jonas and, most brilliantly, Daniel Radcliffe. (Well, he’s the only one I saw but he was a knockout and who knew he could sing and dance like that?)

The show itself, which opened in Broadway in 1961, has music and lyrics by Frank Loesser of Guys And Dolls fame but it doesn’t have as many memorable tunes as that musical comedy classic, which explains why it’s been revived less often. The plot is paper-thin and you have to wait until the end for the big Brotherhood Of Mannumber but when it’s done well it’s worth the wait. Radcliffe did it with pazzazz to spare, backed by an ocean of dancers and strutting stuff you never knew he had to strut. This time we got the enthusiastic ensemble making use of their mic stands instead of their feet and Groff doing some wonderful jazz riffs.

His love interest Rosemary was played by Cynthia Erivo, whose voice was lovely and whose severely-cropped hair was all wrong for 1960s America. There were no other attempts to update this dated show, which is so throwaway it’s understandable why it’s never been ranked as one of the musical comedy greats, and the title’s all wrong: He succeeds because he really tries, even if it means screwing over others along the way.

More than Radcliffe, who was eager and cute in the role, Groff hinted at the darker side of the character and I bet if he’d had more than one stab at it he could have really nailed Finch’s ambitious underbelly. As one-shot deals go, he was still pretty amazing. The campaign to bring him back to the West End in a longer run starts here.

Rating: 3/5

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