ON PARADE.(The Talk of the Town)

Before you can fail upward, you must first dabble sideways. For example, you're a twenty-one-year-old newcomer from Amish country, in Pennsylvania, and suddenly the star of a new Broadway hit, and in the initial gust of acclaim you accept an invitation to appear as a runway model in a fashion show.

Jonathan Groff is the male lead in "Spring Awakening," a critically adored musical adaptation of a century-old drama that chronicles the erotic initiations of a group of teen-agers in pre-Freudian Germany. Groff plays Melchior, a rebellious schoolboy whose hayloft romp with Wendla (Lea Michele) leads to severe trouble; John Gallagher, Jr., plays Moritz, an addled classmate. Some of the numbers are sort of punkish, and so Gallagher and Groff get to rock out, sparing themselves and their audiences the treacly or goofy gestures common to Broadway musicals. They have therefore attracted a different category of admirer. One is Chloe Stuart, the sixteen-year-old daughter of Jill Stuart, the designer, who at Chloe's urging went to see the play and then made room for Gallagher and Groff in her runway show last Monday, in the grand entrance hall of the New York Public Library.

"Crazy, just crazy," Groff said. He had curling papers clipped in his hair, and shiny fingernails--his first-ever mani-cure. (The manicurist had held out her hand, and he had mistakenly shaken it.) On a table someone had arrayed, as for a drug-bust photo-op, dozens of ziplock baggies stuffed with hair extensions. A stylist shouted, "Vanessa! I need you here now."

Groff, who looks tall and thin onstage, seemed stockier, in relation to the lean professionals, male and female, who drifted from one gussying-up station to another. And there was no gloom in him. "We're still in the awe stage," he said. He came to New York from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in 2004, forgoing college in Pittsburgh. His grandfather was a Mennonite preacher and cattle farmer, and his ...