Interview: Matthew J. Taylor of 42ND STREET at MAYO Performing Arts Center

Come and meet the star of 42nd Street! I had the privilege of chatting with the very talented Matthew J. Taylor, who plays Julian Marsh in this exciting production. We talk about life on the road, beloved timeless musicals, preserving vocal health and New Jersey's outstanding Westminster Choir College.

Tell me about this production!

This production is a mildly reimagined but very similar to the original Broadway production from the early 2000's directed by Mark Bramble with original choreography by Randy Skinner. When the show launched 2 years ago Mark and Randy were the primary creatives and this time around Adam Kidd, Mark's assistant, jumped in to continue Mark's work while he is busy in the West End putting the production together. So you're going to see a lot of the same sets, all the same great characters and songs, and a little bit of Adam's flavor. It's a really great take on a really classic piece.

Were you familiar with 42nd Street before you landed the roll?

I wasn't actually; I was urged to go by my then company manager at the time on Guys and Dolls, he encouraged me to go and try it out and meet Mark and as they say "the shoe fit" and here we are!

I noticed you tend to act in primarily classic, period musical theater, is this something you prefer?

It really is, I appreciate contemporary forms of the genre but I really live vocally in the Rodgers and Hammerstein era. I love sweeping melodies and plush orchestration and I love that that era has the ability to say really hard hitting things but say them with a poetic quality in both the music and the lyrics.

I agree, I was recently thinking about Carousel and how it's so heavy yet can be so beautiful and light at the same time.

Absolutely, all of the Rodgers and Hammerstein section of the cannon is like that. South Pacific, oh my gosh, some of those orchestrations and those melodies are so unbelievably soring and beautiful but they are addressing really heavy themes like discrimination and race. It's a really great marriage of story and song.

I imagine that preference for that era connects with your training at Westminster since it's so classically focused there.

It does, my musical upbringing at Westminster was quite different than a lot of other people in the business. Where everybody else was going into the city to go see shows, I was going in to sing with the New York Philharmonic or the Lucerne Festival Orchestra singing things like the Mahler Cycle and Beethoven's 9th Symphony. Instead of doing Summer Stock we were getting shipped off to Spoleto to sing Rossini so that really feels like home to me. And I love it!

What age did you catch the singing and acting bug?

Well I didn't do musical theater at all before high school but a pretty girl was going in for the audition and the rest, as they say, is history! I'll never forget I actually signed with another institution the spring of my senior year. Spring of your senior year is the point where you know where you're going and I was ready to graduate. I was on a ski lift with my grandmother over spring break and I got a phone call from my high school choir director, Renee Kloes, and she said "call this institution and tell them you're not coming, I'm standing in a hallway at Westminster Choir College and this is where you have to go, this is the education you want." So a week later I was at Westminster auditioning and a week after that I was calling the other institution to get my security deposit back!

Westminster is an amazing place.

Yes, really incredible, really inspiring and not a typical education for a musical theater performer but I'm so grateful for everything I was taught there.

I find that sometimes musical theater stars tend to abuse their voices in pursuit of a role but I feel like with your training you would always keep that integrity.

That's absolutely true especially for a role like Julian Marsh who has sort of a growl to his sound, I'm really charged with the task of keeping my voice up. I studied with some really incredible teachers at Westminster. People like Tom Faracco and Chris Arneson, Chris Frisco, Nova Thomas, these people who taught us that the story can only be served by the voice if the voice is doing what it needs to be able to do.

What advice do you live by in terms of vocal health?

Not living outside of your vocal means is something that, particularly in this age of musical theater, if you're spending a lot of vocal money eventually you do run out. And so finding ways to serve the story without taking your voice outside of what it likes or wants to do or that you have the vocal knowledge to do is really, really important. I think that being a little bit chintzy with your vocal money is important. And of course everything you learn in school, simple things, running scales and vocaleses every day to keep the voice facile is essential but also knowing that if you're me, and you're a strong low end baritone, it's probably not a good idea to try to play the screaming rock tenor part.

What is your dream role?

That's a tough one! I've always fantasized about walking through the characters from the Rodgers and Hammerstein cannon, starting with Curley, then Cable, Carousel [ect.]. I have weird connection, and I know it's totally cliché and all of my theater friends are going to roll their eyes but, I have a strange connection with the original cast of Phantom of the Opera. The original Raoul went to my high school and my first job with was Kristen Blodgett the music director who is the "Lloyd Webber lady"!

How are you like Julian Marsh? How are you different?

I think passion for theater is probably the thing we share the most. I'm not 50, I'm not a director on Broadway and I don't have hair. And he has all of these things. The passion and love, his love affair with theater, he views it as an unattainable mistress he's constantly chasing. I can totally relate, being a performer, searching for that role you haven't played but you're meant to play or a role that hasn't even been written yet that you just want to sink your teeth into. So I can understand and attach myself to that love and passion for musical comedy. Juxtapose that with the age and the rage he carries around with him, I can't really attach myself to that but it's fun to play every night!

42nd Street is a musical theater standard. Do you feel like some of the themes still apply today?

That's a complicated question, and a good one for this day and age. I think the themes of hope and that starry-eyed wonder winning over the real world darkness is very relevant today for obvious reasons. Where it can get dated, and we struggled with this when putting the piece together, is how do you present a show written in 1933 with 2017 sensibilities? It comes into the pseudo-love story between Julian and Peggy. Why would Peggy want Julian and why would Julian want Peggy. Is it manipulation? Is it purely sexual? Digging into those things and figuring out how to make them not acceptable, but reasonable goes back to the things I identify with Julian's character. They both have a passion and a love for theater but they come at it from such a different angle. Peggy approaches it from a fresh young place which reminds Julian of the part of him that's still like that. And that's how we tempered that, and what's funny is that the audience never seem to feel that way. They always seem that the mutual love that they have, even if it's from radical sides of the spectrum, is what brings the characters together.

What's it like being on tour? Do you get rehearsal time in each space?

This tour is a blast, having been out with 42nd Street as long as we have, touring is a hard life but it's also exhilarating. We've been to 49 of the 50 states now with the touring production and it's an amazing experience to get to bring theater to the parts of the country that would otherwise not have the chance to experience a big, glitzy show like 42nd Street. So I really enjoy that. We travel with the same deck, set and lights so we don't do much of a rehearsal when we get into the space other than sound check which is our opportunity to feel out the deck and find out where the drops are. Other than that we rehearsed in the city for two weeks and we went out and performed!

To learn more about our star please visit his website www.MattJT.com.

42nd Street will be at the Mayo Arts Center in Morristown New Jersey March 31st at 7:30 and April 1st at 2:00 and 7:30. For more information on the show visit http://www.42ndstmusical.com/ and for tickets https://www.mayoarts.org/.

Don't miss it!