Exclusive: Matt Rodin Had His COMPANY Callback Moments After Getting Married — and Sang in His Wedding Outfit
Moments after saying ‘I do,’ Rodin was singing the words ‘I’m not getting married today’ at one of the biggest auditions of his career.
When Matt Rodin planned his wedding day, he never imagined he’d be going in for one of the biggest auditions of his career just moments after saying “I do.”
Long before Rodin tied the knot with Sam Yabrow, the actor took himself to a performance of the 2021 Tony Award-winning revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Company, with Matt Doyle as Jamie giving a show-stopping performance of “Getting Married Today.”
Rodin immediately thought, “That would be unbelievable to get to do that on tour.”
Yabrow, Rodin’s fiancé at the time, encouraged him to get an accompaniment track to Jamie’s patter song so that if and when he got in the audition room, he’d already be prepared to nail it.
“It was probably the best audition of my entire life,” Rodin exclusively tells BroadwayWorld at The Festival, where he performed “Getting Married Today” on the mainstage for those in attendance at the weekend-long event. “[Casting director] Merri Sugarman was so shocked.”
“I really wanted it,” says Rodin. However, he “bombed the callback,” and the dream of hitting the road with Company seemed to no longer be in the cards.
“We just didn’t click in the room. I didn’t get it,” says Rodin, adding that he had to just “let it go.”
When Rodin was playing Roger in Jonathan Laron’s rock opera Rent at the Paper Mill Playhouse in Millburn, New Jersey, he learned that the person who booked the role of Jamie in Company had dropped out of the production, and the creative team was bringing people back in for another round of auditions.
Rodin jumped at the chance, but his schedule was also jam-packed. He was in Rent through Sunday, July 2, and decided to have a small wedding ceremony with Yabrow the following day on Monday, July 3, since their families were already going to be in town. The two planned for an intimate celebration with their nearest and dearest in Central Park.
Days before they were set to say “I do,” Rodin got a call. “They said, ‘Hey, they want to see you one more time, and they’d like to see you on either Sunday or Monday,’” he recalls. “And I was like, ‘Well, I don’t want to go in before the closing performance of Rent.’ And Sam and I had already planned, because the closing was the night before, that we’d get married in the morning in Central Park with just our two families and four of our friends.”
Because the ceremony was in the morning and they planned to celebrate with friends at a bar in midtown later that night, a break was already built in during the middle of the day. “I wanted to have a nap break in the middle of the day,” says Rodin. “But then I was like, ‘Okay, I guess I’ll just get married and then go to this final session’” — at which he had to sing the words “I’m not getting married today.”
On Monday July 3, 2023, Rodin and Yabrow tied the knot at 11 a.m. They went back to their apartment and did a “cheers” before suddenly everyone was wishing Rodin good luck and telling him to break a leg at his callback. “I left the apartment when everyone was still there,” Rodin says, explaining that it was then off to Pearl Studios.
“Merri Sugarman opened the door and handed me a box of chocolates,” says Rodin, who showed up to his callback in the same outfit he was married in. The story itself, he says, was too good to be true — and an opportunity he simply couldn’t pass up.
Days later, he got the call. “I had never booked anything that big before,” says the Beau actor. “I had been around for eight, nine years and worked on the red carpets for so long and that side of the business. And there’s always that part of me that thought, ‘I want to be taken seriously as a performer,’ So this felt like that validation.”
Rodin’s first year of marriage was spent on the road. “It was hard,” he admits. “But we learned how to communicate. We’re great together, and we’re really good apart. He travels so much for work, too — and me traveling is always a possibility. So we got really good at being able to keep love alive from a distance.”
Getting to sing “Getting Married Today” in Company each night was well worth it.
“You have to think… I’m singing the song that I sang on my wedding day eight times a week,” Rodin says. “I’m thinking about my wedding every single day because I’m singing the song I sang on my wedding day — and I wore my own wedding ring in the show.”
Photo Credits: AJ Tamari; Matthew Murphy for MurphyMade
