Jonathan Groff's Incredible Tap-Dancing Homage to Sutton Foster
Jennifer Keishin Armstrong on the Broadway star's joyous tribute to a fellow icon
This week, I’m excited to share a guest post from New York Times bestselling author Jennifer Keishin Armstrong, whose books include Seinfeldia and Sex and the City and Us. Her latest book, So Fetch: The Making of Mean Girls and Why We’re Still So Obsessed With It, comes out Jan. 16. She also has a fun newsletter, which you can read here.
Jennifer has kindly shared one of her go-to serotonin boosts, which is also one of mine!
Jonathan Groff is, essentially, free happiness as far as I’m concerned.
Musical theater, in general, brings me unbounded joy, often even the worst of it. But I have never seen this man do anything and not ended up with an enormous smile on my face. That ineffable something that makes me tear up with delight at the best parts of humanity when I see a musical? It lights up at the mere sight of Jonathan Groff. 1
Add in a dose of Anything Goes and an homage to Sutton Foster, and you’ve got yourself a ticket to serotonin overload. I mean, my god, what monster doesn’t love Cole Porter? He’s like the Beyoncé/Taylor Swift/Jay-Z of his time, with his internal and slant rhymes and topical references.2
Though I think this video stands on its own, you can’t fully appreciate it without knowing that it’s an homage to a rehearsal video of Foster and the cast of the 2011 Broadway revival that went viral. I honestly tear up every time at the tap-dancing breakdown; even though it’s out of context and out of costume, it’s still a testament to the beauty of Broadway in particular and musical theater in general.
I have a sweet personal history with Anything Goes. My boyfriend in high school, Dave Freiberg, whom I very much loved (and still do), starred as slick-guy Billy Crocker in our school production of the play. I wasn’t in it at all, but I attended every performance as it ran throughout a week at Lockport Township High School in the ‘90s, and I memorized every line.
He was debonair and bass-voiced, like an old-time movie gentleman. I was so proud of him, and of the others in the play, especially Lisa Barry as Reno. She seemed, to me, like a full-fledged adult woman on that stage, so glamorous and talented, along with Dell Robinson, a tap-dancer so extraordinary that he actually ended up performing on Broadway, no small feat for people from our part of the country.
Dave and I broke up a few years later, he came out seven years later, and I’m still proud of him and that production. (We remain close friends, and I was the best woman at his wedding.) We have videos of that Anything Goes, and any time I re-watch it—which, yes, we do sometimes when we have some wine—I remain committed to the opinion that it was very, very good. Somehow, I feel as if I were a part of it, even though I was merely a literal cheerleader for it. If you looked up in the balcony on any given night of that Anything Goes run at LTHS, you’d have seen me, mouthing along with the words, the embodiment of the heart-eyes-emoji before it existed.
This experience informs my love for Groff doing Foster doing Anything Goes. Groff is, of course, an actual Broadway icon, but he’s casting himself as a fan here. A fan, in this case, of Sutton Foster, of whom I am a staunch admirer. I saw her in Thoroughly Modern Millie and have followed her career ever since, this gorgeous giant of a singer-dancer-actor who can as easily play hard-bitten Reno Sweeney as she can Marian the Librarian or, most magnificently to me, the TV role that should not have worked at all, that of an editorial assistant lying about her age in the absolutely bonkers publishing-world dramedy Younger.
This is proof that I will watch her do anything. I will, similarly, watch Groff do anything. Groff doing Foster doing Anything Goes is like a fever dream I never anticipated, and never want to wake from.
I’m writing here today in anticipation of my book about Mean Girls. A movie version of the musical version of the movie, which was a hit on Broadway, is now in cineplexes. I saw it twice on stage, and it gets it, the magic of musical theater, on the most basic level: It’s about the ways we can express our inner souls musically even when we can’t quite reach the same level of vulnerability and drama in real life.
Reading recs:
**Mean Girls and The Color Purple aren’t the only movies adapted into musicals only to be turned into movies again. This Vulture article about the history of this practice shows that while it’s a very odd trend, it’s not a new one.
This week’s fun fact:
Okay, this is not a very timely fun fact at all. But I was tickled by it nevertheless:
The Night’s Watch cloaks on “Game of Thrones” were made out of IKEA rugs.
Costume designers are so amazingly creative! Not only did Jon Snow wear the finest in IKEA couture, but there’s a cheeky tutorial if you would like to create your own.
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Thanks so much for reading, and I hope you have a good week!
P.S. If you’re so inclined, you can pre-order Advika and the Hollywood Wives, out in paperback on Jan. 23. Click the link below to support independent bookstores!
Editor’s note: In case you’re not familiar with Groff, he originated the role of King George in Hamilton, starred on Netflix’s Mindhunter and voiced Kristoff in Frozen, among other things. He’s pretty much great in everything :)