Jonathan Groff

I saw Beauty and the Beast.

I saw Grease.

I saw Annie Get Your Gun with Bernadette Peters, which I was like losing my mind for.

I saw, in high school, I saw Thoroughly Modern Millie six times.

Yeah.

Obsessed.

Obsessed with her.

Yeah.

That spoke to you?

She, on stage, well, on stage is a couple of things.

She would, like, be right here.

There was a level of presence about her that was so magnetic and I couldn't, like...

stopped looking at her when she wasn't speaking in scenes I would be staring at Sutton because she felt so alive and then she had been the understudy in that show out of town and replaced and kind of was like pushed out into the front to take on that role which was like 28 years old and there was almost like

Like when it's really hot, when it's really hot and you're driving and you see those waves of heat coming off the road, you know that?

When you're like in the car and you're like, whoa, it's so hot that you can see the air is like, that was what was coming off of her body.

When I, in my experience and my memory of watching her and it was like heat was coming off of her.

Yeah.

Once I was in high school, there was two community theaters in my hometown, the Fulton Theater and the Everett Performing Arts Center.

They're both still there.

And at the Fulton Theater, I was meeting actors that they hired from New York to play the leads.