JUST IN TIME Choreographer Shannon Lewis Talks Going Viral With Splish Splash

From theatre influencers to celebrities like JoJo Siwa to everyday dancers, it seems like everyone has attempted to nail the joyous elbows in Splish Splash. The source of that choreography? Just In Time’s choreographer Shannon Lewis. With Just In Time's cast album being announced recently — two exclusives from star Jonathan Groff, we saw no better time than to revisit her iconic work.

Lewis is a veteran Broadway dancer and SNL and Last Week Tonight choreographer who is making her Broadway choreography debut with the Bobby Darin musical. We chatted about her feelings after seeing the dance go viral, giving choreographers credit, SNL 50, and more.  

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Firstly, how's everything going? You made it through the season.

It feels like the Tony Awards were kind of like the end of a little bit of a chapter, not that anything is closing or finishing, but it's been an amazing  journey up to that point Just in Time opened late in the season, so it just was kind of our foot on the gas up until the end the season and the Tonys. It was thrilling and great. I'm also involved in SNL, so the 50th season was in full swing during most of that for me, so I was rushing off to do filming with them. I also work on Last Week Tonight, which I did the day before the Tonys, and so it was kind of a crazy, wonderful time for me. Now I've taken a breath, and I'm ready for what's next. 

Let's just hop into the meat of why I wanted to chat with you today. It's your Broadway debut, choreographically speaking, of course. And now your dance has gone viral all over the world on TikTok. Just walk me through the last week or so when you discovered this was happening.

Let me go a little further back, because when we were creating the show, the dances for the show when I was brought on board last summer. Right around now actually, we did a dance workshop and Splish Splash was one of the things that I wanted to work on because I kind of felt like there was like a dance break possibility in there, because it was like this really fun, iconic kind of quirky song. We found all this Bobby Darin footage where he did quirky, interesting things on live shows like Ed Sullivan and we wanted to portray that in the show. 

I came up with this quirky dance break working with Andrew Resnick, our musical arranger and conductor, orchestrator. And we came up with like this drum break kind of percussive thing that we wanted to just make our own that wasn't in the original number. Then when Jonathan Groff got his hands on it, he was like, "this is the greatest thing ever." And so we knew we knew that we had something. 

Cut to the first preview of our show, people were walking out doing the elbows, like all the audience members, people who aren't dancers at all, they were going, "yeah, I love that. What's that step where you go like this?" And I was like, that's crazy because people were really, really picking that up from seeing the show once. And, and they kind of were going crazy for this dance break. And so we had a sense that it might be something that people might wanna do, but of course, you don't know until you know. Then we filmed a rehearsal video that we thought maybe we film it in rehearsal, thinking ahead to when we have some actual B-roll so we could do a potential rehearsal performance video. We didn't know what would happen. 

Then our social media team put that together. From the minute that that went out, it started going crazy. They reached out and said, "I don't know if you know that this has like gone completely viral." That's when people started filming themselves. It started with just fans of our show, and then it went wider and wider and wider outside of America, the worldwide, and then we have celebrities. We just had Jojo Siwa do a video yesterday. People are great. It's really great to see. Someone said to me, "it's spreading joy." And that's really, honestly, people right now, we all need that. It's bringing a smile to people's faces. It's getting them up dancing. And of course, linking it to our show and what we're doing in our show and the music of Bobby Darin and Jonathan's performance, et cetera. It couldn't be better. We just thought it might be something fun for people to do, and so we were so pleased to see where it's gone. 

If someone wanted to really nail this video, what is one piece of advice you would give them to really nailed it? 

Oh, I have so many pieces of advice. Number one, joy and fun. It's joyful, silly fun. Number two, pay attention to the shapes, the elbow shapes and the highs and lows, the ups and downs, the bend in the knee, the crouch down, the lean back. The shapes are really, really important. And obviously, the musicality is very evident because it's a percussive dance break, so the more you can really hit it hard it matches with the music even better. 

I want to jump over to Jonathan Groff for a moment. When we spoke on opening night, you told me that choreographing and working with him was very inspiring. I'm curious, obviously Groff, beloved by all, but we haven't really seen him move like this in a long time, if really ever. I'm curious what was it like getting him and his body ready to jump into something so wildly different than let's say Merrily last season? 

Jonathan is inspiring. He's beloved for a reason, he is as kind and wonderful as you want him to be and even more so, and even more talented. But also like I've said in the past that he is a beast. Like, don't be fooled by his sweetness and his open-heartedness. He is a beast and he will chew that choreo. He wants to do it better than anybody. He has the ambition to be the best that he can possibly be in everything he does. When it comes to dance, that's infinite. 

You guys have been able to perform some of these numbers on Colbert, on morning shows, on the Tonys. I'm curious what, if anything, you have to change in the process of changing some of the movements to better serve for camera work or up close shots, and how does that work? 

Such a great question. I love that you asked it because I think people don't always really understand that what's right for a stage isn't always right for a camera lens. You have to tell the story in a different way. Colbert was amazing because it was our first real like national television appearance for the show. What's great about Colbert is it's a stage that's on film. So there was nice dovetailing of our immersive environmental staging at Circle in the Square. We brought the band on stage with us, we had our sirens backing up, and then we were really able to kind of embed the Steadicam within all of that and give it a good feel of what it actually feels like to see our show in a theater on camera. 

But take something like Good Morning America, where their stage, their set is like four angled places. We actually didn't know what number we were going to perform. We walked in and we took a meeting with everybody. Then I talked with Alex Timbers, our amazing director, and I said, "what do you think about Splish Splash here? Like, I think we could actually pull it apart and deconstruct it and do it like it would actually be done back in Bobby Darin's day that he was doing these things on Ed Sullivan, so let's actually treat it like that." I was really proud of that one because it was extremely complicated. In that multi-camera situation, the folks at GMA did an incredible job following us and we had a lot of rehearsals. 

I’m curious, what really is it about Bobby Darin's music that makes you so excited to choreograph? 

I think it's innately danceable. When I first listened to Beyond the Sea, which we all know, if you listen to it again, there's like a dance break in the middle of it. There's just like this big percussive break that busts out in the middle and it feels like dance should be there. It doesn't feel like we're shoehorning or forcing dance into this music. It feels like it's a natural thing that wants to happen. It gives me a lot of meat to chew on musically and it  inspires a lot of movement to come to my mind. And knowing that the band would be on stage in our show, that the band is present the entire time and very much a part of not only the storytelling, but the music is sonically so present. As a dancer, as a performer, when you have literally trumpets playing right behind you, just try not to dance when you have that. I knew that that was going to be something that I think we don't see all the time and I knew it wouldn't feel like we were shoehorning the dance in because it's just so natural. 

I want to jump over to SNL as you mentioned at the top. You're coming off season 50. I'm curious how you're feeling about this, honored New York tradition. How did you survive doing that and all these shows and Broadway? 

*laughs* I don't know. You can hear I lost my voice last week because I just was like screaming “five six seven eight” everywhere I went. It's a thing that happens to choreographers. Listen, SNL is unlike any other job. I say SNL is like New York City itself, because if you can make it there you can make it anywhere. There is no day where you feel like "I nailed that." You're on your toes trying to keep up with the best of the best. Every person that works on the film unit where I work is a genius. And it's thrilling. Like that's why I wanted to come to New York. It's as wonderful and as terrifying as you think it is. But also like, how cool that I have learned how to make decisions quickly. I've learned how to get down to something fast and hear the music and make quick decisions. But then also this year, I was doing that on this SNL side, but then on Broadway having more of the process. Having the longer process, and having this thing that we made now set and performed every night the same way, I'm having both ends of the spectrum in terms of that. And it's pretty fulfilling like that. 

I know you've done so many Broadway shows yourself. I was curious if for your next Broadway adventure... 

I can't say anything, but soon! 

To close it out and circle back to Just in Time, I know you're obviously going through it right now. I'm curious, when you reflect back on the entire Just In Time experience in five, ten, twenty years, what is it that you want to remember most about this moment right now? 

The first thing that came to my mind was that how lucky I was that this was my Broadway choreographic debut. I waited a long time. I had my performer time and I was so happy to do that and I actually had to go away from Broadway to come back to it. How lucky I am that it's this one, that it is with Jonathan Groff, who is incredibly brilliant and eager to make himself better, with Alex Timbers, who's a visionary, with the music and the life story of Bobby Darin, where I was given the opportunity to have the characters of the Sirens be developed by me, where dance was their first talent that they needed to have and the storytelling nature of them. It's its own new kind of animal and I got to be a part of that development. I feel so blessed.