At 20 years old, Gaten Matarazzo is already something of a Broadway veteran. The New Jersey native was only 9 when he made his debut in Priscilla Queen of the Desert, a few years older when he appeared in Les Misérables and then, just last year, took over the role of “Jared Kleinman” in the final Broadway cast of the hit musical Dear Evan Hansen.
Still, even theatergoers who had followed his career from the beginning couldn’t help but be caught off guard by his performance in Tony Award–winning director Thomas Kail’s current revival of the Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler dark, funny and musically lush classic Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. As the young orphan Tobias, Matarazzo is on stage for about 25 minutes of the musical’s just-shy-of-three-hour running time, and even alongside Broadway heavyweights Josh Groban and Annaleigh Ashford, the Stranger Things star more than holds his own.
Within those 25 minutes, Matarazzo performs one of Sondheim’s most beloved songs, “Not While I’m Around,” the tender ballad of devotion – this in a musical not exactly known for tenderness or devotion. To say the expectations of Sondheim devotees are high is an understatement – the song has been performed by everyone from Barbra Streisand to Barbara Cook, Mandy Patinkin to Neil Patrick Harris, Angela Lansbury to Melissa Errico, Betty Buckley to Patti LuPone.
So yes, expectations are high, and Matarazzo nails it, just as he does sweet Toby’s Chaplin-esque comedy turns, though perhaps that’s less surprising – as the brainy, clever and somewhat goofy Dustin Henderson on Netflix’s Stranger Things, Matarazzo handles a sizable chunk of the sci-fi series’ humor.
He does the same in Sweeney, sometimes even to his own chagrin. Handed the show’s parting lines of spoken dialogue, Toby, drenched in blood, surrounded by corpses, completely mad and brandishing the slain demon barber’s very own razor, Matarazzo was surprised during the early weeks of the run when audiences broke out in nervous laughter. The chuckles would evaporate soon enough though, when it became all too clear that Matarazzo and his performance were as serious as a blade sharpened for butchery.
Fans who can’t make it to the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre anytime soon will be able to hear Matarazzo and the rest of the Sweeney Todd company when a new cast album is released on Reprise Records later this year. And of course he’ll be seen in the upcoming fifth and final season of Stranger Things on Netflix. Filming reportedly begins in June, and while Matarazzo is excited to return to the show, his focus and his pleasure are at the moment on Broadway.
Deadline recently spoke to Matarazzo about Sweeney Todd, Stranger Things and these heady days of Broadway’s latest spring. The interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
DEADLINE: Tell me how you got involved with Sweeney Todd.
GATEN MATARAZZO: It was just an audition. That’s all it was. They sent material. I did it over tape, and I didn’t hear back for a few months so I thought that they had gone a different direction. I feel like anytime you send in a tape, you should let it roll off your back and just move onto the next one and forget that you even had an audition. If it happens it happens. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t. You just move one. But I didn’t move on. I wasn’t very satisfied. I didn’t really like my voice on the tape. Then they asked me to come back and it was wonderful.
I think they liked the tape.
DEADLINE: What was it about the tape you didn’t like?
MATARAZZO: I think everybody is very critical of stuff that they do, and this is a dream role, a dream show. I wanted to make sure that I put everything into it, but I think that can also make you very, very critical of yourself. I just felt that I could have done better.
DEADLINE: Maybe you had some trepidation because this musical is considered by some to be not only Sondheim’s best, but one of the best musicals ever. And your character has one of his most beloved songs – “Not While I’m Around.”
MATARAZZO: There was straight up fear for a while. This song and this show are very, very intimidating but I think the most important thing was to ensure truth above everything with this character. It’s very easy to kind of get to a place where it’s a little bit cartoonish and the character has a bit of a reputation for being a bit campy. There can be like this weird vibe of the chimney sweep and a crazy, big “top of the morning” accent that can just overtake the character.
DEADLINE: The Mary Poppins-Dick Van Dyke of it.
MATARAZZO: The very Mary Poppins of it! And I just really did not want to do that. That was my biggest thing. When I saw who was in the show I was like great, I’m amongst some of the best performers that have graced the stage in recent years and that was very intimidating. So, I just had to re-center and know what I could bring to the table. I’ve been singing my whole life but I’m certainly not anywhere near as vocally trained as some of the people on that stage. I knew that anything I was going to bring had to come from me truthfully and play to my strengths fully. I want people to listen to the words of that song and not listen to the notes of that song, if that makes any sense. I think the most comfortable I feel on that stage is during that number.
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DEADLINE: That song is the heart of the show. It’s one of Sondheim’s most beloved numbers.
MATARAZZO: I try to get rid of those expectations. Everything is subjective. Perception is subjective. People will like what they like, and people will dislike what they dislike. You can’t do anything about that. You have to do what makes you feel good. You have to react truthfully to what is being given to you by whoever is on stage with you and thank God it is Annaleigh because she is truly a genius. I know she’s going to hate me for saying that, but I know it’s the absolute truth.
Even on days where I’m not really vocally feeling it, or on days when I’m not really feeling very centered in the scene, as long as I can reach the little checkpoints that I set for myself I can usually leave and call it a good show.
DEADLINE: The reviews for this show and for you were ecstatic. Did you read any of them?
MATARAZZO: I try not too but my family gets very excited, so they send them to me and of course I have no self-control. I think that’s kind of the one thing about this job, it’s built on the way you are perceived by those watching you and that’s really, really weird to wrap your head around. I’ve been dealing with breaking out of that shell since I was very, very young. You knew, whether or not you were doing a good job based on people telling you that. When you’re 13, 14, that sticks, and it’s hard to break out of that even now. A part of me would rather some people not like what I do very, very much, so they’d have low expectations and then they’d be like, oh that was good. You know what I mean?
But the best way to combat that is to just not read the reviews because a lot of times even good reviews perceive your intentions behind a certain scene or a certain choice differently from what you were going for, and that can be frustrating.
DEADLINE: Does the audience reaction get your attention?
MATARAZZO: I talk about this with Annaleigh and a lot of the cast members quite often during the show, like, “They were quiet on that line read” or “They didn’t like this joke, it didn’t land, something was clunky.” But that’s just how this all works. That’s just how live theater goes, and you’ve got to get used to that.
DEADLINE: You don’t play Toby campy or over the top, and yet you’re very funny in the role. How did you walk that line?
MATARAZZO: Oh, that’s a good question. That’s something that I think I had to get out of my own head. I took it so seriously in the beginning. I took this character so seriously and I took myself so seriously, it was so cringey. Then I realized there’s a lot of opportunities where you can just have some fun despite the history of this character, despite what he’s gone through, what he’s currently going through. It’s a different type of comedy though.
I’ve done comedic roles before and the role I’m most known for – Dustin in Stranger Things – is really known for his comedy, but I think he kind of knows he’s funny, or he knows he’s being funny at least to himself. I think he finds himself amusing and the thing about Toby is that he has no damn clue that what he’s saying is oddly funny, not to the people in the scene or to the audience, and that’s a weird thing to teeter on. You just have to be fully truthful in any delivery you give.
Sometimes there’s no intention for me to get a laugh and it will get one and I’ll meet that with disappointment. Of course [the musical] ends the way it does, and I’m surrounded by a bunch of bodies covered in blood and my next line is “You will pardon me, gentlemen, but you may not enter here,” and for the first few weeks people laughed a lot at that line and I was so mad. It just took a while for me to be like you know what, that’s fine. As long as people are listening and taking it in. It kind of just taught me a lot about audiences and how they’ll react and to just enjoy what happens. Most of it is out of your control.
DEADLINE: Well, it’s very darkly funny and I think people respond to its humor. Even unintentional humor. The night I was there, during the shaving scene, a big glob of shaving cream hit you in the face and you brushed it off beautifully. People laughed but it was all very in the moment.
MATARAZZO: What’s great about that specific scene is that you never really know. You don’t know how thick that shaving cream is going to be. Sometimes it’s very soupy and it goes across like a shower of rain all over the stage and sometimes it doesn’t even leave the brush. That’s a good example of how there’s so much that’s out of your control and you just have to roll with the punches, do what you do best and just react. You can’t be set in your ways, you’ve got to be flexible.
DEADLINE: There’s a bit of choreography I wanted to ask you about, when you have to fall over sideways on a table and the ensemble catches. It looks like you’re tipping over in slow motion. It’s like that old game of trust that kids play. What goes through your mind as that’s happening?
MATARAZZO: We’ve done this so many times that I feel very, very safe. We’ve never had a mishap. Sometimes it’s different when one of the swings is on because [ensemble member] Jonathan Christopher, who’s in that scene and helps lower me down, is quite, quite tall, and if one of the swings is significantly shorter than Jonathan, as most people are, I’ll have a little bit more of a drop. And we definitely don’t want a drop there, we want a slow, concise movement. The goal is to basically to make it look like I haven’t even landed on that table as I’m being dragged across it. Some people say it looks like I’m gliding down an esophagus, and I thought that was really cool.
DEADLINE: It’s a good example of how the choreography in the show works, with all these very exact, odd movements…
MATARAZZO: Steven Hoggett, our brilliant choreographer, calls them shapes. Any time we get a call for a choreo day, he say’s “We’re doing shapes today.”
DEADLINE: That’s it. You’re moving your hands in these weird sorts of ways.
MATARAZZO: Weird is a good way to say it. There’s something interesting about the way he decides to make people move that can invoke fear, discomfort. There’s something unsettling about certain ways that we’re required to move. It’s one of the things that’s really hard to look at but you can’t really take your eyes off of it. It’s disturbing, and it’s interesting. Steven is truly one of the most brilliant minds in choreography in the world today.
DEADLINE: I have to ask you a last question. The new season of Stranger Things is coming up. The filming starts when?
MATARAZZO: We don’t know yet. I hope soon but I’m fine with whatever. They can take their time, so I can do this show as long as I can. I know they’re hard at work and they’re writing away as writers do, and I can’t wait to see what they come up.