For those of you within traveling distance, this is a reminder that Death By Fruitcake will have its Quad Cities premiere at the Last Picture House in Davenport, Iowa, this coming Friday, May 9, at 7 p.m. Stars Paula Sands, a superstar broadcaster in this part of the world, and Rob Merritt, one of the most popular Iowa-based actors, will be on hand. So will I and Barb and producer/d.p./editor Chad Bishop.

As I’ve mentioned here previously, the Last Picture House is a terrific boutique venue (two screens) with a bar out front and classic framed movie posters hanging everywhere. It’s the brainchild of Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, the Quad Cities filmmakers who have achieved fantastic success with A Quiet Place, 65 and The Heretic, among others.

We are in discussion with several possible distributors and hope to have Death By Fruitcake (based on the “Barbara Allan” Trash ‘n’ Treasures/Antiques novels) on a streaming service for holiday season. (Our Blue Christmas is on Tubi right now.)

Something has been on my mind, nagging at me, which means I should probably risk boring you by discussing it here.

As anyone who knows me at all well – from those who went to school with me to audience members of my two rock bands to co-workers and readers of my work – know of the three obsessions that have followed me through much of my life. First came Dick Tracy, which I somehow managed to become the second writer of. Finally came Mickey Spillane, who I incredibly got to know personally and became his collaborator, both during and after his lifetime.

In between came Bobby Darin.

Music – popular music, chiefly rock ‘n’ roll and show tunes – was always a major part of my life. My father, for the first ten years of his professional life, was a high school music teacher of surprising renown and the director of a male chorus that won national honors. Our living room was often filled with students and local citizens rehearsing for my father’s various productions. As I’ve said here before, he directed the first high school performances of Oklahoma and Carousel (at least according to family legend and the Des Moines Register).

I saw Elvis debut on The Ed Sullivan Show. The first 45 record I owned, at probably nine or ten, was “Don’t Be Cruel.” Pat Boone led me to Little Richard. Throughout my adolescence and teen years, I spent my allowance on crime fiction paperbacks (Spillane, Hammett, Chandler, McBain) and 45 and LP records – soundtracks, Broadway shows, rock ‘n’ roll. I saw the Beatles in their first appearance (all of their appearances, actually) on Ed Sullivan. On Ed Sullivan I later saw Vanilla Fudge doing “You Keep Me Hangin’ On” and have never been quite the same since.

Anyway, Bobby Darin.

As a pre-adolescent, I had liked “Splish Splash” and “Dream Lover” on the radio, but can’t say Darin hooked me any more than other pop/rock performers. This is likely because I hadn’t caught him on a TV show in live performance. Not until I saw him do “Mack the Knife” on Ed Sullivan. And that really changed my life.

This convergence of crime fiction and pop music sent me flying from the house on my Schwinn bike to go the record shop and buy the “Mack” 45.

I became a devoted collector of Darin’s records, tracking down his early, unsuccessful Decca singles (which didn’t sound much like him, frankly). For Christmas, shortly after my enthusiasm for Darin began, my parents gave me his album That’s All, which remains his definitive album, with both “Mack the Knife” and “Beyond the Sea” on it. He would have been 23 years old.

What appealed about Darin to a kid in Iowa? Robert Walden Cassato (Barb and I named our chief-of-police character, Tony Cassato, in the Antiques books after him) had been a sickly but cocky Bronx kid. All I had in common with him was music and a certain cockiness grown out of insecurity. Only years later did I learn Darin had been born with the same heart valve issue I had, and that he’d overheard a doctor telling his mother (well, she was his grandmother, really, but never mind) that he’d be lucky to make it to eighteen.

That explains a lot about him. It’s why he told Life magazine he wanted to be a legend by 25. It’s why he jumped from rock ‘n’ roll to big-band swing with stops along the way to the end of his 37 years of living at country-rock, r & b, traditional folk, folk-rock, British Invasion rock, and Dylanesque protest music.

He died on the operating table having the same operation I survived.

So I feel a closeness with this great artist – this single performer who mastered every form of popular music he touched to where if he were the only 20th Century recording artist whose work remained, you’d still have a good picture of what popular music in that century had been. Did I mention he was a first-rate actor, who was Academy Award-nominated, and who co-starred in some terrific movies, including Hell Is For Heroes and Pressure Point? And some Doris Day/Rock Hudson type fluff with his then-wife Sandra Dee?

When he died, little was written about him in the press. The much more minor Jim Croce died around the same time and was lionized. As Kurt Vonnegut said, so it goes. But every now and then something pops up in the culture to give Darin at least a mini-renaissance. A song of his will wind up on TV or in a movie – “Splish Splash” on Sesame Street, “Mack the Knife” appropriated by McDonald’s, “If I Were a Carpenter” (among others) on The Sopranos, “Work Song” on Severance.

The now-cancelled Kevin Spacey’s bio pic, Beyond the Sea, underrated but doomed because of the disparity between lead actor and age of the subject, nonetheless sparked renewed Darin interest. Spacey also did concerts in tribute to Darin – I saw one and it was very good. But anything Spacey touched seems tarnished now. People can’t separate art from artist, but that’s another discussion.

Anyway, Darin’s immense talent and his catalogue of songs (many of which he wrote himself) have kept him popping up in the public eye. Now there’s a Broadway show, Just in Time, with the gifted Jonathan Groff playing Darin.

Travel is less appealing to me, these days (I think that’s true for a lot of people, particularly older ones); but when I heard about this production, I immediately started looking in to making an NYC trip to see what promised to be a terrific production.

From what I’ve seen in excerpts on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert and on YouTube, it looks to be very entertaining. The Circle in the Square theater has been transformed into a nightclub – the kind of venue that Darin owned as few performers every have (or ever will). The seating is bistro tables. Man, did I want to see that show.

I’ve changed my mind, at least somewhat. As skilled and talented a performer as Groff clearly is, he is – again, based on excerpts from the show – a performer with nothing much in common with Darin but talent and a big ego. And the show – I stress I’ve only been able to see the Colbert performance and perhaps half a dozen YouTube videos – appears to unintentionally patronize its subject.

When Groff appeared on Colbert, he entered through the audience — something Darin himself did from time to time, particularly on Dick Clark’s nighttime show – and began by saying that he wondered what Bobby Darin might say about the young artist playing him appearing in the same Ed Sullivan theater where Darin had performed “Beyond the Sea.” Then he delivers a punchline, imagining Darin saying, “Who’s the gay guy?”

That sums up what I find off-putting about Groff’s undeniably energetic performance: it’s about Groff, not Darin. That flip (but calculated) remark is so at odds with Darin, who was a progressive who wept in the rain at RFK’s graveside and did not have a prejudiced bone in his body, that I knew Just in Time would be about Groff, not BD.

To a large degree, that’s okay. But I’m uneasy when Groff goes into the audience, singing “Dream Lover” to a man and changing the lyric to, “Someday, I don’t know how, I hope he’ll hear my plea.” He is playing Jonathan Groff, not Bobby Darin.

When I heard people saying Groff is channeling Darin, I can only say, “Really, though? Is he?” I don’t expect him to channel Darin, and I don’t even think trying to do that is appropriate. It’s not meant to be an impression, after all. But there’s nothing in Groff’s approach that is reminiscent of Darin. At all. Darin managed to combine the brashness and swing of Sinatra with the casualness of Crosby or Dino. He exuded energy even as he seemed to toss off one song after another. Few artists have ever combined intensity with nonchalance in such a winning way.

The dancing, from Groff and the three back-up dancers, is aggressive and, yes, impressive…but robotic. All calisthenic, calculated, no grace. Bobby had respect for the show business legends that preceded him – he could soft-shoe with George Burns, he could pay tribute to George M. Cohen, he could trade quips with Bob Hope. And he could then go on the Midnight Special and sit at the piano and tear through a medley including “Splish Splash” that would impress Jerry Lee Lewis.

Again – I have only seem excerpts. Maybe Groff does all this. But I am troubled by a video clip of Groff doing “My First Real Love,” the ballad Darin wrote for one of the several loves of his life, Connie Francis, as performed by fellow Just in Time cast member, Gracie Lawrence. Both are very good, but the performance is an over-the-top spoof – not just of the song, but of ‘50s rock in general. The band is solid. But they know jack shit about rock ‘n’ roll of the era they’re dabbling in, and patronizing.

Look, both Gracie Lawrence and Jonathan Groff just got Tony nominations. They no doubt deserve them. But when I said to Barb, “I don’t think we’re going to try to make it to New York for the Darin thing.” She said, “Good call. It would make you furious.”

Here’s Groff and Lawrence, and you may love it. I don’t, quite.

Here’s Bobby and Connie Francis.

And here is the real thing.

M.A.C.