Interview: Shannon Lewis Says Choreographing JUST IN TIME Was a 'Like a Big Sandbox to Play In'

The new, immerisve musical Just in Time is officially open on Broadway, starring Tony Award winner Jonathan Groff as the legendary singer Bobby Darin! At the center of the show's dynamic movement is choreographer Shannon Lewis, who after a 25-year career and 10 Broadway musicals as a performer, is now making her Broadway debut as a choreographer.

BroadwayWorld spoke with Lewis about her choreographic process, the collaborative and immersive nature of building the show, and more! 

Just in Time is a vibrant, immersive reimagining of Bobby Darin’s life. What were the first choreographic images or ideas that came to mind when you began creating movement for this world?

I love that question so much. I love the percussive, dynamic energy of the dance arrangements of the original Bobby Darin songs and music. There are glide-y parts, and there are big dance breaks that are in the originals. That really led me to see a jazz dance element to the show. And then I went down a rabbit hole looking at all of these Bobby Darin performances that he did on Ed Sullivan, and Hullabaloo, shows like that, that had this loose, fun, fantastic kind of quirky thing going on. And then I read the script, and I started to understand how I could tell the story through this movement, and thread the movement throughout the whole story.

You’ve had such a rich performance career on Broadway, and now you’re making your Broadway debut as a choreographer. How does it feel to be doing that with this show?

It feels amazing. I feel like it’s just a continuation of what I’ve done before. I don’t think I could have been at this moment in my career as a choreographer without the performance before. I always was craving, as a performer, the ability to have my own creative process. That’s something that I was really yearning for, and it just feels so fulfilling to get to do it with a show like this that is so dance forward, and dance plays such an important role in the storytelling.

Bobby Darin’s music spans so many genres and moods. How did you draw from his signature energy and versatility to shape the choreography across the show's musical numbers?

I did my research, but then I put the research to the side, and I put my creative blinders on, and I tried to then interpret it through my own filter. It was really important to me that it obviously was rooted in who Bobby Darin was as a performer, but then also I have the incredible talent Jonathan Groff portraying Bobby Darin, and his strengths are so many. He really can do anything.

So, what we were trying to tap into for his movement was, everyone always talked about Bobby Darin’s electricity on a stage. I’ve said it before, it’s a quote that Sammy Davis Jr. said, the one person he didn’t want to follow on a stage was Bobby Darin, which is a pretty incredible thing! So tapping into movement and performance quality that would evoke that.

He was a quirky guy, he had an improv quality to his performances, he would go with a feeling, he would go off on the side and play the drums, and then come and do a dance break that the band wasn’t expecting and they kind of had to follow him. So, our show has a little bit of that quality as well. It’s never the same twice, and we’re also telling a very specific story as well. I think that’s what’s been really fun to play with in this process.

What was it like working with the rest of the company? What was the collaboration like in the rehearsal room in building the show?

It was incredible. First of all, our visionary director Alex Timbers was guiding us the whole way. We did actually rehearse on a mock-up of the entire immersive set, so the show was built in an immersive way, it wasn’t taken from a proscenium room and then expanded. It was really created in that way. So, it was working with all the performers who were doing scenes on different stages and connecting with each other, and dancing through people’s seats in the audience, that’s been really fun. And I had my ideas, but I was using the talent that was in front of me and was creating this movement vocabulary that we could all take from. The choreography is set, but in our process, it was finding it together, for sure.

I have these fantastic three female performers, we call them The Sirens, and they are basically everything, they sing, they dance, they act, and they are helping us narrate the show. They pretty much tell the story right along with Bobby Darin. So, working with them and helping develop that concept was really rewarding as well.

The immersive set aspect, did that play into how you choreographed? Did you know that’s how the set was going to be built when you got into the rehearsal room?

I knew that it was going to be immersive. And it was all under development as we were going through. Alex came up with the concept with our amazing set designer Derek McLane, and we started with one version of the set that had a bandstand on it, and stairs and things, and we kind of went from there like, “Oh, there’s too many stairs here!” or “We need these stairs bigger,” or “We’d really like to utilize this platform more for dance now that we see it!” So, as we evolved the show and were creating the show, the set was evolving along with us.

It was very rewarding to be a part of the thing going, “You know, actually, I had an idea that maybe they do a dance break over here, and we widen the stage, and put some lights on it!” And then Alex would get an idea, and then I would riff off that. Then, you know our wonderful star Jonathan Groff would say, “What if I do this?” So, we all kind of built it together. It was truly like a big sandbox to play in!

Do you have any final thoughts you’d like to share?

I love watching the audiences we’ve had come and find the show and get sucked into it. It’s truly theatre in that way, that it’s different every night with the audience, with the way the audience responds, and where they laugh, because the show is being played in and around them. We have our large production numbers on the main stage, but then we have these little satellite areas where the rest of the show can be played out, and the audience does make up their own part of the show, their energy will guide us.

It’s a really incredible thing to be a part of, and I’m so honored to be a part of a show where Jonathan Groff is getting to fulfill his dream of really truly dancing on Broadway. And he is so captivating in his movement, and I’m just so in awe of what we’ve been able to do together, and I can’t wait for people to experience that.

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