There is something wonderfully theatrical about Jonathan Groff arriving in Stratford-upon-Avon to play Rosalind. An actor whose career has been defined by movement between Broadway and screen, intimate plays and blockbuster musicals, comedy and drama, is now stepping into one of Shakespeare’s most exhilarating characters. And he is doing so in a production that returns As You Like It to one of the most intriguing theatrical traditions in its history: an all-male company.

From 26 September to 7 November 2026, Groff will make his debut with the Royal Shakespeare Company as Rosalind at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon. Directed by RSC Co-Artistic Director Daniel Evans, the production features an entirely male cast, with Fisayo Akinade playing Celia. The RSC describes the production as a joyful exploration of Shakespeare’s comedy, in which “love is love; no matter where it falls.”

For Groff, it is more than another prestigious credit. It feels like the latest, and perhaps most revealing, chapter in a career that has consistently refused to stay inside a single theatrical box. Long before Shakespeare, Groff established himself as one of the defining performers of his generation of musical theatre. His breakthrough came with Spring Awakening, first Off-Broadway in 2006 and subsequently on Broadway, where he originated the role of Melchior Gabor. The performance announced a young actor with a rare combination of vulnerability, vocal precision and emotional openness. That role also established something that would become fundamental to Groff’s career: he has never treated the musical as a lesser form of acting. For him, song is not an interruption to dramatic storytelling but an extension of it. The trajectory that followed was remarkable. He played Claude in Hair, appeared in Hamilton as King George III, and became internationally recognisable as the voice of Kristoff in Disney’s Frozen franchise. His theatre work has also included The Bacchae, Prayer for My Enemy, The Submission, Little Shop of Horrors and, most significantly in recent years, Stephen Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along.

It was Merrily that brought the career full circle. Maria Friedman’s acclaimed Broadway revival placed Groff alongside Daniel Radcliffe and Lindsay Mendez, with Groff playing Franklin Shepard. The production won the 2024 Tony Award for Best Revival of a Musical, while Groff himself won Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role in a Musical , finally his first Tony Award. The victory was significant not simply because of the award, but because of what it represented. Groff had spent nearly two decades moving through the musical-theatre canon, from the raw energy of Spring Awakening to the sophistication of Sondheim. By the time he accepted his Tony, he had become not merely a musical-theatre star but one of the form’s most versatile dramatic actors.

And even after Merrily, he did not slow down. In 2025 he returned to Broadway as Bobby Darin in Just in Time, earning another Tony nomination for Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role in a Musical.

Groff is not entirely new to the British stage. His relationship with London theatre began in 2010, when he made his West End debut in Matthew Warchus’s revival of Ira Levin’s thriller Deathtrap at the Noël Coward Theatre. He appeared opposite Simon Russell Beale and Anna Massey, playing Clifford Anderson, the young playwright whose arrival sets the play’s dangerous game in motion. At the time, British theatre audiences already knew Russell Beale as one of the great stage actors of his generation; Groff was arriving from the success of Spring Awakening and the rapidly expanding world of Glee. The production was an important early encounter between Groff and London’s theatrical culture. Deathtrap was not a musical, and it required a different kind of stage presence: less about vocal architecture and choreography, more about tension, timing and the intricate mechanics of a psychological thriller.

Sixteen years later, his return to Britain is on an entirely different scale. This time he is not entering the West End but travelling to the heartland of Shakespeare, to the company most closely associated with the playwright’s work. The RSC debut therefore has the quality of a homecoming to a theatrical tradition Groff has approached from the other side of the Atlantic.

Rosalind is one of Shakespeare’s great theatrical shape-shifters. Exiled from court, she enters the Forest of Arden disguised as Ganymede and begins a complex game in which gender, performance and desire continually overlap. It is a role that asks an actor to be many things at once: romantic heroine, comic intelligence, disguised lover, observer and performer. Rosalind is constantly acting and, crucially, she is acting within the action itself. That makes Groff an inspired choice.

His career has repeatedly been built around characters who exist between identities. Melchior in Spring Awakening gave him a young man struggling to understand a world that refuses to speak honestly about desire. King George in Hamilton transformed historical distance into theatrical comedy. Franklin Shepard in Merrily We Roll Along demanded a performer capable of allowing an audience to witness an entire emotional life moving backwards through time.

Rosalind adds another layer: the actor will be playing a woman who is herself playing a man. And the fact that the entire company is male makes the idea even more intriguing.

The RSC‘s production deliberately engages with the historical circumstances of Shakespearean performance, when women were excluded from the English stage and female characters were played by male performers. But this is not simply historical reconstruction. The company is presenting the convention through a contemporary lens, with Groff at its centre.

The result could turn Rosalind’s theatrical intelligence into the central subject of the production: a character who understands that identity is something we construct, perform, test and sometimes discard.

There is also a beautiful contrast between the worlds Groff has inhabited. Musical theatre has made him famous for his voice, but his strongest performances have never been merely vocal showcases. His work has always depended on an almost startling emotional transparency, the ability to let an audience see a character thinking, changing and breaking in real time. That quality is particularly suited to Shakespeare.

As You Like It is among Shakespeare’s most generous comedies, but beneath its pastoral romance is a sophisticated investigation of identity. The Forest of Arden becomes a space in which social hierarchies can be suspended and characters can experiment with versions of themselves that would be impossible at court. Groff has spent much of his career doing something similar as a performer: moving between forms without allowing any one of them to define him completely.

He can be a musical-theatre leading man, a dramatic actor, a screen performer, a comic presence and a singer of extraordinary control. He has worked in Spring Awakening, Hair, Hamilton, Merrily We Roll Along and Little Shop of Horrors, while his screen career has included Glee, Mindhunter, The Normal Heart and the Frozen films. But theatre remains the place where the architecture of his career is most clearly visible.

The RSC has framed its 2026–27 season around the idea that familiar stories can acquire new resonance when seen through fresh eyes. Groff’s Rosalind embodies that philosophy almost perfectly. He arrives in Stratford with the prestige of a Tony winner, the experience of Broadway’s most demanding musical repertoire and a previous taste of the London stage. Yet Rosalind represents something new even for him: his first performance for the Royal Shakespeare Company and his first encounter, professionally, with Shakespeare.

For an actor whose career has been about crossing boundaries, between musical and straight theatre, stage and screen, comedy and drama, masculinity and vulnerability, Rosalind may be the perfect role at precisely the right moment. Shakespeare gives Groff a character who knows that love can make us performers. Groff, in turn, brings to Rosalind an actor who has spent his entire career proving that performance can reveal who we really are.

And in the Royal Shakespeare Theatre this autumn, that promises to be quite a show.