https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/18/theater/just-in-time-broadway-profit.html?unlocked_article_code=1.jVA.pZty.W5IS0TtTZzf4&smid=url-share
Bobby Darin Musical Reaches a Rare Broadway Milestone: Profit
“Just in Time,” which for a year starred Jonathan Groff, is the first new musical from last season to make money for investors.
By Michael Paulson
“Just in Time,” an exuberant biomusical about the short-lived midcentury pop star Bobby Darin, has accomplished an increasingly rare feat on Broadway: profitability.
The show’s producers said in an interview that they have recouped their $12.5 million capitalization costs — the amount of money that it took to develop the show and open it on Broadway. That means the production can repay the investors and begin sharing profits with them.
The musical, featuring Darin hits including “Mack the Knife,” “Beyond the Sea,” “Splish Splash” and “Dream Lover,” starred Jonathan Groff for its first year, and his talent, likability, and popularity made it a very hot ticket. During Groff’s final week, in late March, the show grossed more than $2 million; the best seats were selling for $1,477 each and the average ticket price was $362, which vastly exceeded the industry average for that week, which was $131.
The grosses have come back down to earth since Groff’s departure — he was succeeded by Matthew Morrison (“Glee”) and then Jeremy Jordan (“The Great Gatsby”). But it is still earning more than it costs to run most weeks; it was sold out last week, and the show’s producers say they hope it will continue to run indefinitely. The show, produced by Tom Kirdahy, Robert Ahrens and John Frost, is also planning a North American tour, starting next summer.
The success of “Just in Time” was not a foregone conclusion. The show opened in April 2025 to low expectations from an industry that thought Darin, who died in 1973 at the age of 37, was no longer a famous enough subject to sell tickets. Reviews were mostly positive, but The New York Times was lukewarm, praising Groff but calling the show “a quasi-concert” with “narrative arthritis.” The show was not nominated for the best musical Tony Award; it was nominated in six other categories, and won zero.
“The industry missed the boat on this one,” Kirdahy said, “but the audience didn’t.”
The show is running at one of Broadway’s smallest houses, the Circle in the Square Theater, which has 690 seats wrapping around the show’s nightclub-like set. The theater size limits its box office potential, but the production’s capitalization costs, as well as its weekly running costs, are substantially lower than most, in part because it has just 11 onstage actors and 11 musicians, which is fewer than at many Broadway musicals.
“We exercised a lot of fiscal discipline along the way, to be really candid,” Kirdahy said. “The fact that we were in a small theater and have been able to make it work and keep it running tells us that we’re doing something right, and we fully intend on continuing to do so.”
“Just in Time,” which has been running for 14 months, is the first new musical from Broadway’s 2024-2025 season to become profitable; none of the current season’s new musicals have achieved that milestone.
Broadway musicals have always been enormously risky investments, but that has become even more true since the pandemic. The only other new musicals to open since the pandemic and become profitable are “MJ,” “Six,” “& Juliet,” “The Outsiders,” and “Kimberly Akimbo,” which announced recently that, although it did not make back its money on Broadway, it was able to pay back its capitalization costs and return a small profit thanks to a successful tour.
“Just in Time” has an unusual history: It started in 2018 as part of the long-running Lyrics and Lyricists series at the 92nd Street Y in New York. Ted Chapin, then running the series, had seen an earlier Darin musical, “Dream Lover,” produced by Frost in Australia; he thought a different approach might work better, and brought the idea to Groff, who signed on after watching Darin clips on YouTube.
Groff enlisted the director Alex Timbers, who worked on the show at 92Y and went on to direct the Broadway version, which features a book by Warren Leight and Isaac Oliver.
