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TicketsArts & Theatre · USMatteo Lane: We Gotta Catch Up!Atlanta Symphony Hall · Atlanta
TicketsArts & Theatre · USMatteo Lane: We Gotta Catch Up!The Masonic · San FranciscoThe profile · researched 18 September 2026
Fifty sets in a month: how Matteo Lane built a theatre tour one Comedy Cellar spot at a time
An opera-trained painter from the Chicago suburbs who turned rejected footage into a 1.8-million-subscriber YouTube channel, Matteo Lane spent 2025 and 2026 collecting the things stand-ups rarely get at once: a streaming special, a bestselling cookbook, a Broadway run and a world tour called We Gotta Catch Up!
Arlington Heights, Umbria, and a very boring day job
Matteo Lane was born on 28 June 1986 in Des Plaines, Illinois, and raised in Arlington Heights on the north side of Chicago. His mother's side is Mexican and Italian, with Sicilian roots in Agrigento and Messina; his father is of Irish descent and served in Vietnam. Lane and his older brother are both gay, a fact he has folded into his act rather than built it around.
The training came before the comedy. At fifteen he began studying opera under the vocal coach Nick Falco. He then went to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago to study oil painting and drawing, spending five months in Umbria painting and singing before taking his BFA in 2009. He sang opera in the bars of Chicago's Boystown, which is roughly where the two halves of his career met.
Stand-up started in 2011 at Chicago open mics. In 2012 he moved to New York and took a job as a storyboard artist, which he has described as the most boring job in the world, before committing to comedy properly. He speaks English, Italian, Spanish and French, and the languages are not decoration — the accents and the switching are load-bearing parts of the act.
A decade of rooms, then the rejection that paid off
The credits accumulated slowly and in the usual order. He was picked for New Faces at Just for Laughs in 2014, worked as a commentator on MTV's Girl Code from 2015 to 2018, and turned up in HBO's Crashing and Netflix's The Comedy Lineup in 2018. None of it made him a headliner.
What did was an accident of business. Lane recorded an hour he had been working on for years with the intention of selling it to Netflix or a rival, and every streamer passed. On the advice of the comic Andrew Schulz he cut the footage into short clips and put them out on social media. The channel he had started in 2021 with 3,000 followers reached 1.8 million subscribers by late 2024. He has said the clips amount to having a television show he controls entirely.
He then self-released rather than waiting. The Advice Special arrived in instalments, and Hair Plugs & Heartache followed in 2023, shot at the Comedy Cellar and built around a ten-hour hair transplant, other people's Italian cooking and growing up gay. It sits at 7.4 on IMDb and has run free on YouTube alongside the paid listing on Prime Video — an unusual distribution choice at the time, and the one that made the theatre tours sellable.
Al Dente, a pasta book, and Abbott Elementary
Matteo Lane: The Al Dente Special premiered on Hulu on 16 May 2025, his first hour for a major streaming service, filmed in front of a Los Angeles audience and topped and tailed by appearances from comedian friends. The material moves through his Italian and Mexican family, his travels and a run at Oprah Winfrey, Mariah Carey and Katy Perry. Reception was warm rather than rapturous: IMDb users have it at 6.9, and part of the fan complaint was that regular viewers of his channel had already seen chunks of it.
Lane himself frames the work as escapism rather than confession. Speaking around the release he said that for one hour an audience can forget work, forget the ex and forget the president, and he has been explicit about not wanting to play the damaged comic. He has said he wants a set to feel like catching up with an old friend at brunch.
The same spring brought Your Pasta Sucks, a cookbook published by Chronicle Books with thirty recipes organised around the places and people that mattered to him — Chicago, New York, Rome, Sicily — and a guest spot on Abbott Elementary in March 2025. In April 2025 he closed a two-year touring cycle with a show at Radio City Music Hall, the largest room he had headlined to that point.
The Ambassador Theatre, June 2026
On 22 June 2026 Lane made his Broadway debut as Billy Flynn in the long-running revival of Chicago at the Ambassador Theatre, taking over from Nik Walker in a limited engagement that ran to 19 July, after which Mark Ballas returned to the part. He played opposite Krysta Rodriguez as Roxie Hart and Sophie Carmen-Jones as Velma Kelly, with Jacqueline B. Arnold as Matron Morton and Greg Hildreth as Amos.
He used what would have been his summer off to do it, and has since called the run the hardest thing he has ever done and the most rewarding. The opera training that had been a punchline for years suddenly had a job.
The personal news of the year ran alongside it. On 18 June 2026, four days before opening, he told listeners of his podcast I Never Liked You that he and his husband Rodrigo Aburto, whom he married on 19 August 2023, had separated. He confirmed in August 2026 that they had divorced, describing the split as amicable.
Where he is in September 2026
The current hour is called We Gotta Catch Up!, and it is a genuine new hour rather than a repackaging — by his own account an hour takes about a year of nightly work, and the Hulu special represented close to two and a half years. The method has not changed with the venue size: he writes at the Comedy Cellar, doing four to six fifteen-minute sets a night, and reckons he did fifty shows there in a single July. He does not use writers, and has said the audience in front of him decides what is funny.
August 2026 was spent in Provincetown, with two nights at Town Hall on 7 and 8 August at $53 to $95 a ticket. The autumn leg opens in Europe: Salle Pleyel in Paris on 26 September 2026, followed by the Nuovo Teatro Orione in Rome on 3 October — an Italian-language market he is unusually well placed to play.
North America then runs to the end of the year: the Paramount Theatre in Denver on 10 October, Carnegie Music Hall of Oakland in Pittsburgh on 15 October, the Palace in Stamford on 22 October, the National Arts Centre in Ottawa on 6 November, the Warner Theatre in Washington on 14 November, the Uptown Theater in Kansas City on 20 November, Atlanta Symphony Hall on 4 December and two nights at The Masonic in San Francisco on 11 and 12 December. Earlier legs took in the Wang Theatre in Boston on 21 March 2026 and the San Diego Civic Theatre in April. The pattern he has described is a long stretch of smaller rooms, around twenty-five shows a week at the developmental stage, before the material moves into theatres.
The show, now
We Gotta Catch Up! is a solo headline set of roughly an hour in seated theatres of 1,200 to 3,500 seats, with 7pm and 7.30pm starts and, on the venue listings for dates such as the Wang Theatre in Boston on 21 March 2026, no support act billed. The material is worked out nightly at the Comedy Cellar in four to six fifteen-minute chunks before it reaches the road, and Lane writes without a writing staff, so the hour arrives tight but still open at the edges — he riffs with the room and lets the crowd decide what survives. The shape is conversational rather than confessional, moving between his Italian and Mexican family, food, travel and celebrity, with impressions and singing used as punchlines rather than a separate musical segment; he has said he wants the hour to work as escapism and has deliberately avoided the damaged-comic register. Staging is minimal: a microphone, a stool, house lighting. Ticket-buyer reaction has been strong on the comedy and mixed on the interaction — a five-star review posted on 19 January 2026 by an attendee called it worth every penny and a chance to see a gay comedy star live, while noting slight disappointment that there was not more audience interaction. Recent legs have run through Provincetown Town Hall on 7 and 8 August 2026 at $53–$95, and continue at Salle Pleyel in Paris on 26 September and the Nuovo Teatro Orione in Rome on 3 October 2026.
Researched from en.wikipedia.org · playbill.com · livenation.com · songkick.com · tvinsider.com · huffpost.com · newsweek.com · provincetownmagazine.com
Pictures
Photographs from Wikimedia Commons, credited
Neal Brennan · CC BY 3.0
