In his West End debut Gaten Matarazzo reveals a fizzing talent for musical theatre.
True, as the beige-bedecked budding documentary maker Mark Cohen, the American Stranger Things is the straight-laced centre of this family of post-punk struggling artists (notwithstanding his Jewish mother and her very Jewish messages). Yet Matarazzo’s wise narrator is no less in command of this rock musical’s tender, high-voltage score.
This is the 30th anniversary year of both the death of the show’s composer Jonathan Larson and the birth of this, his first, fully staged musical. That the death came before the birth – in fact the night before the very first preview – adds an extra tragedy to a work already steeped in the stuff.
In a weird alignment it is also the 100th anniversary of Puccini’s La Boheme on which Larson based his work. Luke Sheppard’s incredibly well sung and staged production makes the almost inarguable case that the musical will be as permanent a fixture on the cultural landscape as the opera.
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