BWW Exclusive Interview: Jonathan Groff Talks About His Upcoming Turn in Encores! A NEW BRAIN, HAMILTON and Much More!

Jonathan Groff may have been away from Broadway for a while, but this season he is taking the musical theatre community by storm. This spring he appeared in The Public Theater's breakthrough production of HAMILTON as King George III, a role he will follow to Broadway later this summer. He also appeared in a sold-out concert event of HOW TO SUCCEED, performed at London's Royal Festival Hall. Now, Groff is taking on the role of 'Gordon' in A NEW BRAIN, as part of ENCORES! Off-Center series.

During a break in rehearsals, Groff chatted with BroadwayWorld about everything A NEW BRAIN, upcoming HAMILTON rehearsals, making his long-awaited Broadway return and so much more. Check out the full interview below and don't forget to catch Groff in the Encores! Off-Center production of A NEW BRAIN, running June 24-27, 2015.

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Firstly, where are you in the rehearsal process now?

We started on Friday and Saturday doing music, and yesterday we started staging it, so we are in full go-mode right now! It's going really great so far.

I heard that you had the idea of being in this show before it was even announced?

Yes! A friend put the song "And They're Off" on a musical theatre mixtape for me when I was in high school, and I bought the album of A NEW BRAIN when I was 15 or something. I was obsessed with it in high school, and I sang, "I'd Rather Be Sailing" for many an audition. Then last year I went to see TICK, TICK...BOOM! with Lin-Manuel Miranda. I left and was on the train going home and I was like, "Oh my god, I would love to do one of these Off-Center things." I was dying to do a musical again.

So I was listening to A NEW BRAIN the next day- I sang through the whole score in my apartment. I was obviously still obsessed with it, and then I was like, "Ok, I will wait a week and if I still feel like I really want to do this I will email Jeanine [Tesori] and ask her if they have a schedule for next year, and if not, if they would want to do A NEW BRAIN. This is where it will sound like a total untruth... five days later, without me asking her, she emailed me asking me to do the show. Isn't that so weird?! So I was like, "Uhhhhh, YEAH!" So we decided that we'd have to meet for lunch, and a couple weeks later we got together and I was like, "This is so crazy, because I was going to ask you to do this exact role in this exact show next summer!" It's a weird, crazy coincidence. And she said, "Well, it's meant to be." And so then, at that time this was sort of an idea in her head and so she had to get Bill to sort of sign off on it. So she contacted him and then we were kind of rolling.

Wow, that's insane!

So crazy. It's SO crazy and the way it had all sort of fell, coming together and the cast is so phenomenal and everybody is having a great time and I was excited to do it obviously because I'm a fan of the show, but I didn't know, really, until the first day of rehearsal. I had lunch with James Lapine two months or so before we started rehearsal and he mentioned that he and Bill [Finn] were sort of interested in looking at the piece again and he didn't get a lot of chances to work on it when it first happened and there were things that they wanted to do differently and I was like 'Okay, cool.' And I had shown up at rehearsal and they had these very clear ideas of it. They had some ideas on how they wanted to change it and in little ways, in small but in big ways. So, I had not anticipated when we started that we were going to be creating a new version of this show, which makes it even more exciting.

Well, let's talk a little more about James Lapine. Is it intindating working with him?

I've heard that. I've heard that he's like an intimidating guy and I think for me, it's his resume I find intimidating, but from the moment that I've met him he emailed me back in January and was like "Hey, we're going to work together. Why don't we get lunch?" And he was very low-key and really cool and just excited and you know, he's been nothing but lovely. They came in two-weeks before we started rehearsal and blocked out the whole show with a group of students to sort of get a leg up on our rehearsal process so they would have a general sense of where we're walking and who was coming in where and all of that stuff.

So, I just so respect and admire that sort of forethought and that pre-planning and I just feel... I've done a couple of one-night only moments before where you rehearse for a week and do it on one-night. Obviously, Encores! has done it a million times and so they have it down but, James coming in with Josh [Prince], our choreographer, two weeks before and sort of planning it all out it just makes us feel so much more secure and safe. It's like there is a big safety net of them sort of knowing where we are going and where we will advance too. It's amazing.

Yeah, Encores! is known for the quick process, but you've been jumping into all kinds of projects very quickly recently- HAMILTON, HOW TO SUCCEED... Do those experiences make this seem a little less daunting?

I know, it's so funny to have the last three months be filled with musicals being done in like a week and just perform them. Yeah, because with HAMILTON I had two-days of rehearsal and then HOW TO SUCCEED with a week of rehearsal and now this. I just love musicals and I feel like perhaps my deep hunger and desire of having not done one for a long-time has made it easier for me to digest and jump back in, because I am jumping back in with having been gone for so long. I have a very deep, deep passionate desire to go into it, so there is kind of like a big want to do them. That probably makes them easier to do it so fast.

I try to learn all of my stuff before the first day of rehearsal, which is also super helpful. Just sort of knowing the music and knowing the basic lines, you know, it doesn't have to be perfect, but just sort of going in and knowing ahead of time. That's sort of my little trick. Because essentially you don't have time to rehearse acting moments and stuff, so the more you can come in off book, the better chance you have of finding some of the acting moments. There is less of, "Is my mark here?" and more of "What are we doing here? What am I doing here?"

You said you have been in music rehearsals so far. What has it been like to sing theis amazing score?

Oh my god, it's fantastic. It's really a dream come true. Having grown up listening to these songs and knowing them so well, and then to be finally getting the chance to sort of exorcise them out of my body... To do that in the room with James and with Bill and with this amazing cast... I'm just sitting here listening to Aaron Lazar and he's singing the "I'd Rather Be Sailing," and I was just like "Oh my god!" It's like my life couldn't be better right now.

Ana Gasteyer is doing the Mom and she just so amazing. It's really an amazing group of people. And Rema [Webb] is playing the homeless woman and I saw her in VIOLET. The whole cast is really talented and they each bring their own sort of thing to it all and it's just the best. It's the best version of each experience, so it's really a dream. We are having our own private emotional moments and I'm just ready to pace myself as we go through. I am just so excited.

Rehearsals for HAMILTON start this week, so how does that work for you?

Yeah they start this week. To get the rehearsal process going they started rehearsing the understudies. I'm going to pop in obviously as soon as this is over and have plenty of rehearsal before the first previews, but yeah thank god it worked out scheduling wise, because I can be here now and do both!

Are you excited to be coming back to Broadway? It's been too long!

I know I'm so excited! I'm SO excited! I'm so excited to just sort of be swimming in all of these musical theatre experiences right now. It's been really fun. I've really missed it. I've really missed it so much. And I've had the chance to see everything and I will learn Sutton's tap dances in my off time because I miss doing musicals so much and having the chance to get to do these shows has been really awesome.

I love this series because it brings attention to shows that a lot of people might not know. Are there any other shows that you think deserve another go, like this one? What role do you see yourself playing in the 2016 Off-Center season?

[Laughs] I haven't! It's so funny because the two off-Broadway recordings that I was obsessed with in high school- that I listened to and know like every word to are A New Brain and Andrew Lippa's The Wild Party. Those are the two CDs, you know before iTunes, that I loved. I wore them out. They have scratches in them from listening to them so much. I'm still listening to them in my car because my car has the CD player. Those two shows I was really obsessed with and I cannot wait to see Sutton [Foster] and Steven [Pasquale] do The Wild Party. I can't wait to hear them sing that music, I cannot WAIT. I am so excited for that. I can't think of another one off the top of my head because those two are the ones that I was most obsessed with in high school.

We are about a week out from performances for A NEW BRAIN- what are you most focused on right now in getting yourself performance ready?

I guess like the physical... We've only learned the first 20 pages of the script so far, so the thing that I am sort of working on most right now is making the blocking feel organic and finding my way around the stage really quickly and in a way that feels honest and real and trying to condense really heightened things that happen. There are some big emotions and I'm trying to make them feel as real and as connected as possible, while moving so quickly. It's really deep. It's a really relatable subject matter, whether or not people have been the hospital for brain things or not. My Dad just had open-heart surgery a couple of months ago so, being in a hospital at all and just sort of the mortality you are faced with and the hilarity that ensues and all of those things that happen.

There are so many emotions, so many feelings, so many events that happen during the course of any hospital stay and in this one in particular. So I'm just trying to do more than just walk through those and find some sort of intricacy and simplicity. That's the goal at this moment, to find those very specific, relatable moments in the music and in the acting that people will see and be like, "Oh my God, yes! I know exactly what that feels like!" Waiting through holding the scripts and waiting through running the blocking and all of that- I am waiting to find those moments and that's what I am most focused on right now.

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Groff most recently appeared in the second season of the hit HBO television series "Looking," created by Michael Lannan and directed by Andrew Haigh. On Broadway, he starred as Melchior in Spring Awakening, for which he received a Theatre World Award and Tony, Drama Desk and Drama League award nominations. Jonathan's Off-Broadway credits include The Submission (MCC Theater); The Bacchae (The Public Theater); Craig Lucas' The Singing Forest and Prayer for My Enemy (Obie Award); and The Public Theater revival of Hair. He starred in Deathtrap on the West End and in Red in Los Angeles. His television work includes "Boss," "Glee," "The Good Wife" and HBO's "The Normal Heart." His films include American Sniper, Frozen, C.O.G., The Conspirator, Twelve-Thirty, and Taking Woodstock.

A New Brain, inspired by William Finn's personal experiences, is a medical tragedy seen through the iris of a Looney Tunes short. After struggling composer Gordon Michael Schwinn (Jonathan Groff) collapses face-first into a plate of spaghetti, he is diagnosed with a brain tumor and is forced to come to terms with his creative ambitions and the lovable screw-ups in his life: an overbearing mother (Ana Gasteyer), a ruthless kiddie-show host (Dan Fogler), and a boyfriend who'd "rather be sailing" (Aaron Lazar). The musical opened at Lincoln Center Theater on June 18, 1998 and ran for 78 performances, winning the Outer Critics Circle Award for Outstanding Off-Broadway Musical.

A New Brain is the opening production of New York City Center's acclaimed Encores! Off-Center series, which is returning for a third season of landmark Off-Broadway musicals. A New Brain will be followed by Little Shop of Horrors, starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Ellen Greene and Taran Killam, playing for three performances on July 1 and 2.Andrew Lippa's The Wild Party, starring Sutton Foster, wraps up the season, playing July 15-18. Jeanine Tesori is the Artistic Director of Encores! Off-Center and Chris Fenwick is Music Director.

Photo Credit: Joan Marcus