‘TREAD’ING THE BOARDS

How Matty Maggiacomo Turned a Love of Broadway Into a Different Kind of Performance

By Ricky Anderson

There are many ways to be a theater kid.

Some people want to be onstage. Some want to write the show. Some want to direct it, design it, produce it, or critique it. Some simply want to sit in the audience, watch the curtain rise, and let the experience spark something inside of them.

And then there are people like Matty Maggiacomo.

He runs. He walks. He talks. He teaches. He podcasts. He fangirls.

And somewhere between a Broadway opening, a Peloton treadmill, a podcast recording, and a conversation about which show everyone should be seeing right now, Maggiacomo has created something that feels increasingly rare: a career built not around distancing himself from his fandom, but leaning completely into it.

For Maggiacomo, Broadway was never simply something to watch; it is a place to belong.

“I’m just a fan,” he says. It is a deceptively simple description for someone whose professional life now regularly intersects with the very artists and institutions he once watched from the audience. But perhaps that is precisely the point. Maggiacomo has never attempted to disguise the enthusiasm that brought him into the room in the first place. Instead, he has made that enthusiasm the work.

Maggiacomo’s theater roots begin in Providence, Rhode Island, where regular trips to Trinity Repertory Company to see A Christmas Carol became a family tradition. Later, high school introduced him to a wider theatrical vocabulary, from commercial productions to Off-Broadway work that felt willing to take greater creative risks.

Then came The Phantom of the Opera, as it did for so many.

Maggiacomo was nine years old when he saw the production at Boston’s Wang Center. From the back of the enormous theater, he watched a gondola move across the stage and chandeliers rise from trap doors. Just like Christine, he was under a spell and changed forever.

It is an origin story that feels fitting. Phantom is theatrical excess in its purest form: spectacle, music, machinery, romance, melodrama, opera, ballet, and a chandelier that has become one of the most recognizable pieces of stagecraft in the world.

For a young person discovering theater, it is difficult to imagine a more effective gateway drug.

His first New York theater experience came through Nunsense, an Off-Broadway comedy that he remembers seeing during the annual trips his family made to New York. Soon, he was participating in theater himself, joining his high school drama club and discovering that the stage could be a place not only to watch, but to play.

Professional performance, however, was never quite the destination. Maggiacomo understood his own relationship to the craft early. He could sing. He could act. Dancing, he jokes, was another story. “I knew that my relationship with performance was always going to be a little bit more academic.”

So he found another way in.

At NYU, he double majored in journalism and dramatic literature, studying Shakespeare and taking classes through Tisch. He became a student of theater without needing to become a professional theater artist. That distinction would eventually become one of the most important parts of his career. Because being a fan gave Maggiacomo something that professional distance can sometimes take away: joy.

“I just really get to enjoy it and not be jaded about it,” he says. That philosophy has followed him into nearly every corner of his work.

He remembers arriving in New York and taking advantage of in-person rush, seeing show after show after show. Eventually, as his career developed and he could afford better seats, his standards changed accordingly. But the appetite never did.

He remains an unapologetic supporter of the arts. He will accept the invite ticket. He will talk about a show. He will recommend something he loves. But he is not interested in destroying something simply because it failed to meet his expectations. “I don’t really do reviews,” he explains. “I do recommendations.”

There is a generosity embedded in that distinction.

Even when a production does not entirely work, Maggiacomo looks for something that does. Maybe the song is great. Maybe the scenery is beautiful. Maybe the choreography works. Maybe the chorus boys are hot. There is always something. “I would never want to contribute to people not seeing a show which could hit these (actors). Again, they’re the workhorses of entertainment.”

It is, in many ways, the same philosophy that has defined his relationship with performance itself. Rather than asking what is wrong with the thing in front of him, he seems instinctively interested in asking what is worth loving. Perhaps that is why his transition from theater fan to theater insider feels so natural.

Social media helped collapse the distance.

One of his closest friendships, with performer Jessica Vosk, began on Instagram. Maggiacomo simply reached out because he admired her work. They eventually met for brunch, and the relationship became something much more meaningful than the parasocial admiration that initially connected them.

Peloton became another bridge.

As an instructor, Maggiacomo began spending thirty minutes at a time with people all over the world. They got to know his personality, his humor, his interests, and, inevitably, his love of theater.

Then something unexpected happened. The theater people started finding him, too.

Broadway performers began taking his Broadway-themed classes. His playlists became another way for performers and fans to recognize one another. His professional worlds began overlapping in a way that would have been unimaginable to the nine-year-old sitting high above the stage at the Wang Center.

“It’s been great to be recognized as part of the club, of the drama club, truly,” he says.

The club has gotten considerably larger.

Maggiacomo’s Broadway programming on Peloton has become a way of bringing theater into a fitness environment that might otherwise be dominated by electronic music, pop, or traditional workout playlists. The classes are not necessarily blockbuster programming, and Maggiacomo knows that.

But that is not really the point. There is a specific audience that wants to run to a cast album. There is a specific audience that wants to walk while listening to show tunes. There is a specific audience that would rather stretch to Sondheim than sweat to EDM.

“I know that there are other folks out there like me,” he says.

So he holds space for them.

Every time he works with his producers to plan his programming, he makes sure Broadway has a place on the calendar. For Maggiacomo, the inclusion is not simply a novelty. It is a way of connecting people to something they already love, while potentially introducing them to something new.

He describes it as a Trojan horse. Someone might show up because they want to work out. They might leave knowing about a show they had never heard of. That is the power of the platform.

For those who do not live in New York or London, Broadway can sometimes feel impossibly distant. Before the internet, access to musical theater was limited to whatever made its way onto television, the occasional touring production, the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, or the Tony Awards. Maggiacomo remembers a time when Rosie O’Donnell’s show was one of the places audiences could reliably encounter Broadway performances outside of the theater itself.

Now there are clips, bootlegs, social media, slime tutorials, and increasingly, professional captures.

But there is still something missing.

The context. The recommendation. The person who says, You should go see this. That is where Maggiacomo’s particular brand of fandom becomes valuable. He is not simply broadcasting his admiration. He is creating a conversation around it.

His Walk & Talk classes can become miniature theatrical dispatches. He might emerge from a performance, turn on the camera, and tell his audience what he just saw. Sometimes the recommendation is detailed. Sometimes it is simply: go see it.

And then the audience does. He recalls recommending Paranormal Activity after seeing it himself. The next day, members of his class returned having taken his advice and loved the show, fully displaying the power of this parasocial activity.

“I get to be an influencer,” he says, laughing. “Not paid for that.”

That distinction matters to him.

He does not want his recommendations to become advertisements. If a show gives him a complimentary ticket, that does not mean the production has purchased his enthusiasm. If anything, his relationship with the art depends upon maintaining the ability to tell his audience what he genuinely believes.

His platform has increasingly become its own little theater community.

Actors join his classes. Broadway performers appear on the platform. Conversations that might traditionally happen backstage, in dressing rooms, or over drinks after a performance can now happen while someone is running on a treadmill in another state.

Cynthia Erivo has taken his class, a class you can currently stream “live.” So have Jessica Vosk, Cheyenne Jackson, Nikki James, Frankie Grande, Constantine Rousouli, among others.

For the theater fans taking those classes, the experience is about more than celebrity proximity. It is about access to a world they love. Perhaps that is the real connective tissue running through everything Maggiacomo does. He is constantly finding ways to bring people closer to the thing they already love.

That same philosophy informs The Drama Club, his podcast, which approaches theater from a perspective that is considerably less reverent than the traditional celebrity interview. The goal is not to place performers on pedestals. It is to bring them into the room.

Maggiacomo often asks guests to introduce themselves rather than opening with a traditional biography. The conversation begins with the person, rather than the résumé. Guests sit in his living room, kick off their shoes, have a drink, and talk.

Sometimes there is gossip. Sometimes there is industry conversation. Sometimes there is simply a discussion about what it feels like to make theater. But the underlying principle remains the same: celebrate the art form. Even if it is a little inside baseball, from time to time.

“Examining the art with love in our heart,” he says.

It is an increasingly unusual position in a culture that rewards outrage, criticism, and hot takes. Maggiacomo is not uninterested in criticism. He is simply uninterested in making criticism the entire point.

There is a difference between being discerning and being cynical. Maggiacomo would rather remain curious. Perhaps that is because he remembers what it felt like to be the kid sitting in the audience. He remembers wanting to be invited to a Broadway opening and the all-encompassing nervousness of attending his first one. He remembers looking at the people whose work he admired and feeling overwhelmed by the proximity to the world he had spent so many years watching from afar.

Now he is part of that world.

He attends openings, knows performers, and interviews them. They take his classes, message him, and become friends.

And still, there are people who make him nervous.

The legends. The Patti LuPones. The Bernadette Peterses. The Audra McDonalds. The people whose names carry decades of theatrical history.

Maggiacomo admits that he is not always brave enough to walk up to them himself.

He likes having a buffer: a friend who can make the introduction. Someone who can bridge the distance between admiration and introduction.

There is something charming about that admission because it reveals that the fan never really disappears. The professional may walk into the room, while the theater kid is still standing behind him.

And maybe that is the magic of Maggiacomo’s particular career. He has never had to stop being a fan in order to become part of the industry.

His fandom became the throughline.

It informed his academic life. It shaped his social world. It became part of his Peloton programming. It became the premise of his podcast. It created friendships. It created access. It curates to a community for people who, like him, want their workout accompanied by a cast recording and their commute punctuated by a recommendation for what they should see that night.

There is something deeply theatrical about movement. Actors move across a stage. Audiences move through stories. Careers move in unexpected directions. People move toward one another.

And Maggiacomo is almost always moving. On a treadmill. Through a conversation. Down a Broadway aisle. Toward a friend.

For Maggiacomo, the treadmill and the theater are not separate worlds. They are both places where movement becomes meaning. Both require endurance. Both require rhythm. Both ask you to keep going even when the destination is not immediately visible.

And both are better when someone is there beside you.

That may ultimately be Maggiacomo’s greatest contribution to the theater community. Not performing the show himself, but creating more ways for people to experience it. Building the audience and reminding them that it is okay to love something loudly, enthusiastically, and without apology.

Somewhere out there is another nine-year-old sitting three balconies away from the stage, watching the candelabras rise through a trap door and feeling the world suddenly become much, much bigger, and more magical.

Maggiacomo knows what that feeling is. He has spent his career finding new ways to pass it on. And if he gets to do it while running five miles to a Broadway cast recording, all the better.

For more information please follow @stagelightmag @mattymaggiacomo @onepeloton @rickypresents