The 90s rock opera spawned the kinds of irrepressible musical numbers – Seasons of Love, Take Me Or Leave Me – that would become Broadway standards, mastered and massacred in choir auditions and high schools across the world. Jonathan Larson’s self-described attempt “to bring musical theatre to the MTV generation” is also a capitalist critique: a drama about a bohemian coterie of penniless creatives sticking it to the man, all while their circle is ravaged by HIV and Aids. It still feels highly relevant today; see: What You Own – sample lyric “And when you’re living in America / At the end of the millennium / You’re what you own”.
Gaten Matarazzo says “that song may arguably be more impactful now than in 1996, considering what we know about what American media and world media would become, and our access to constant mind-numbing noise …” This autumn, he makes his West End debut as Mark, the struggling film-maker who chronicles the lives of his friends in New York’s East Village, and serves as the show’s de facto narrator. It’s something of a musical theatre-themed year for the 24-year-old, best known for playing lovable super-geek Dustin in Netflix’s Spielbergian smash Stranger Things. Earlier this year, he filmed Octet, an upcoming Lin-Manuel Miranda a cappella film about phone addiction, based on a play by Dave Malloy.
Of course, when a TV star makes the transition to musical theatre – or just theatre full stop – there are often accusations of stunt casting. After years of auditions, Matarazzo made his Broadway debut aged just nine, in the antipodean jukebox musical Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. A dive into the depths of Google unearths a video of him – in Les Misérables, aged 11 – giving a tour of the theatre to camera (“We use a lot of fog in the show,” he explains).
He cringes a little at the mention. He left Les Mis in March 2015 and booked Stranger Things in June of the same year. (“Bananas!” he says.) But before the show had finished airing, he had already found his way back to the stage, appearing in Dear Evan Hansen and Sweeney Todd on Broadway in 2022 and 2023 respectively. It was around this time that many of his TV fans discovered his background in musicals (one YouTube comment reads: “The day I found out he could sing was a beautiful day indeed”).
We meet at a fancy bar in central London, close to where the Rent rehearsals are taking place, Matarazzo arriving with a heavy-looking rucksack slung over his shoulder and a smattering of brown curls poking up messily from under a baseball cap. Stranger Things may have finally ended on 1 January 2026, but it still looms large over his professional and personal life. The show that was “expected to probably only be one season” went on for five, with Covid and the Hollywood writers’ strikes stretching its run to almost 10 years.
Matarazzo tries a couple of metaphors – catapults, snowballs – before settling on one to describe the feeling of going from being an average kid to a TV star. It was, he says, “a train you can’t really jump off. Not that we really would have wanted to, but it would become stressful every now and again.” Up until that point, his life – blossoming Broadway career aside – had indeed been quite normal.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
