Jonathan Groff

It's interesting.

Right before we started rehearsals, I was obsessively listening to the music, became obsessed with the score.

And I was trying to know the music before the first day of rehearsal because the music is not changing because this is a revival of it.

famous Sondheim show.

And I would get to learning Our Time, and I would just weep.

And I was like, okay, I guess once I'm in rehearsal, I'll stop aggressively weeping and we'll be able to sing the song.

And then our first day of staging this song in the show, sat there with Maria and Dan and Lindsay, and we're just all weeping.

And we're just...

We're crying.

I don't know.

We're mourning the inner child.

We're at the dreams, all of it.

And it wasn't really until we had the audience there that I could actually...

pull myself together because understanding, okay, this is a story that we're telling for an audience.

And what Maria, especially in the intimacy of the off-Broadway experience at New York Theater Workshop, where we were for three months before moving to Broadway, and the audience is really in your lap.

And that, for me, brings up a lot of self-conscious feelings.

And Maria helped me by saying,

The ideas that you're articulating are more important than you're feeling embarrassed that the audience is so close to you.

Say what they wrote.

You have to send these ideas into the audience and out into the street outside.