Santino Fontana

Greg Serrano stands behind a bar in West Covina and watches Rebecca Bunch lie to a room, and Santino Fontana lets us see him decide, in about a second, that he does not believe a word of it and would like to see her again anyway. That is the whole performance in Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (2015): a man too clever for the town he is stuck in, too tired to leave it, and too honest to pretend the woman he wants is good for him. Rachel Bloom and Aline Brosh McKenna wrote him the best male part in the programme, and Fontana played it dry and low, which on a series that runs on volume was the right call. He also sang, and the voice is a proper Broadway one, which the programme knew and used.

He left after one season, and we felt it. The series was built for two more years of Rebecca not deserving Greg and Greg knowing it, and without him the men around her got pleasanter and less interesting. We were sorrier about his exit than about most television deaths, which is an odd thing to say about a bartender who simply moves on, and the reason is that Fontana had made Greg the only person in West Covina who seemed to be watching the same show we were.

Before that there was Frozen (2013), where he voiced Hans, the prince Anna agrees to marry after knowing him for a day. It is a harder job than it looks: he has to be smooth enough that we understand her, and Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee's first act depends on it. He is, and we did. We will leave the rest of the film where it is.

The screen has used him sparingly; the stage has not. He played Hamlet at the Guthrie at 23, straight out of the Minnesota training programme in 2004, made his Broadway debut in Sunday in the Park with George in 2008, and went on to originate Tony in Billy Elliot (2008), Prince Topher in Cinderella (2013) and Michael Dorsey in Tootsie (2019). We have not seen those in a form we can review, so we will not judge them, but the pattern is plain enough: princes, charmers and men pretending to be someone else, which is the same trick Greg and Hans were doing from opposite ends. He has said of acting that "It's all weird. If you're really doing your job, you're never being yourself," and that is a fair description of what he does with charm. It always looks like the character's idea, never the actor's.

If you want to see what he can do, watch the first year of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and stop worrying about where the story is going. Then wait. Television and film have given him one good part each in a decade, and both times he was the best thing on screen for as long as he was on it.