Caleb Mathura makes Broadway debut in gritty ‘The Outsiders’ | Entertainment

When the Broadway audience meets teenage Johnny Cade, he’s looking rough.

“Johnny Cade enters nervously smoking a cigarette,” read the stage directions for “The Outsiders,” a musical based on the 1983 film, which cast Ralph Macchio in the role. “He is 16, looks young for his age. His face is freshly broken and bruised.”

Johnny has been Wisconsin-born actor Caleb Mathura’s “dream role” since before the show won a Tony Award for Best Musical in 2024. On March 17, Mathura will step into Johnny’s scuffed sneakers and make his Broadway debut.

Mathura, who graduated from Verona High School in 2018, spent the past few years touring with the national companies of “Mean Girls” and “The Notebook.” He first auditioned for “The Outsiders” two years ago.

First, Mathura went for an open call (meant for all performers who meet the criteria for a role) and got cut early. Then he went to a work session last December, but didn’t hear back.

“With ‘The Outsiders,’ they don’t cast with one person in mind,” Mathura said. “They cast with the intention of creating an ensemble. … As an actor, when you hear ‘no,’ you take it personally, but it’s never personal. It’s logistical. It’s not a reflection on you, or the work you bring to the table.”

This winter, he got the call: Mathura was the new Johnny Cade. Within six days, he’d started rehearsal in New York City, where he’s excited to finally sign a lease.

“I’ve had like two suitcases with me since I graduated college,” Mathura said. “It’ll be cool to settle down and have an apartment that’s mine.”

Based on a 1967 novel by S.E. Hinton, “The Outsiders” has a folk rock-inflected score and is set in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where the Socs (short for “socialites,” pronounced “soh-shes”) and the Greasers are at war. Mathura plays the best friend of the main character, Ponyboy Curtis, and says the show’s most memorable tagline: “Stay gold.”

Mathura spoke with the Cap Times about what’s different between a national tour and Broadway, what it means to play a younger character, and how to rehearse onstage fighting.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

A performer I interviewed once said that Broadway is just like theater anywhere else, but on a bigger stage. Do you find that to be true?

I actually kind of feel the opposite. Going on tour, we’re playing these houses that are between like 2,000 and 4,500 seats. The last seven months, I’ve been with “The Notebook” playing these gorgeous, humungous houses.

And then I got to the Jacobs Theatre (on Broadway) and I was like, “Oh, my gosh, it’s tiny.” (At 1,078 seats), it’s about half the size of the smallest house we played on “Notebook.” It’s so intimate … you can see the eyes of the actors, you can see the tears, you can see the sweat. Even from the last row, you have a great seat in the house. I think that takes some of the pressure away.

One of our co-directors for “Notebook,” Schele Williams, told us that when we’re onstage it’s for us, and the audience is spying on us. At the Jacobs, that feels like the case.

“The Outsiders” has a rumble in the rain. How do you rehearse for that? You can’t have rain in a rehearsal room.

We actually won’t get rain until our first show. That’s going to be a whole other element. But with fighting, we have an incredible fight team … they have every track memorized to a T. We’re in pairs, and they go person to person and talk them through what they’re going to be doing. They teach it very slowly to counts.

If you have zero to 100% (intensity) — and 100% is full-out, no marking — we never do it past 65-80%. They never want us to go full-out for safety, even when the audience is there.

With these very intense scenes, a lot of times your emotion can take over, and you might not have the control that you need to do this safely. They stress that to us, and it’s a lot of repetition and just mathematical physicality.

What’s interesting about this fight is it’s not done to music, it’s done to (the sound of) a train chugging closer and closer. It’s very percussive. Phase one is the grunting and breathing of the group; phase two is thunder and rain and you start to hear the train; and phase three is when you hear the train pounding, and thunder and rain and fighting, and everything is happening all at once.

How do you play a character several years younger than you are?

Physicality helps a lot. With Johnny, I think of a rag doll, just because he’s tossed around so much. And his posture — he’s not standing too tall, not necessarily because of the age but because of his demeanor and how he’s perceived.

In “The Notebook” I understudied young Noah and I played Fin (a teenager). When I’m clean-shaven I can pass for young, which is nice.

In a recent interview, you said “The Outsiders” was one of your favorite shows. How do you connect with it?

On so many different levels — as a young man, as an actor, as a New Yorker — I feel like “The Outsiders” encapsulates so many things that are important to me.

The show is very intense and thrilling to watch. There’s a lot of fighting and blood and fire. The whole ceiling rains down on the actors. But also, there’s so much love. It’s about chosen family and brotherhood, putting your life on the line for the people you love. It’s a testament to the many forms of love that exist today outside of romance.

What have you taken from growing up here in Wisconsin that serves you now, on Broadway?

Overture Center played such a heavy hand in my excitement about theater. It opened that portal to what Broadway is, and what professional theater is. 

With Children’s Theater of Madison, they have young actors working with professional actors. The Madison theater scene has so many mile markers that kept me putting one step in front of the other, like Music Theatre of Madison and Verona Area Community Theatre. I felt like, no matter what level I was at, I had a huge community of people supporting me.