Nick Alvino never set out to be on Broadway.
The 24-year-old actor and influencer has already graced the Great White Way twice, but theater wasn’t something he seriously considered as a career until college.
Alvino grew up on Long Island, close enough to New York City that his family would make the pilgrimage to Broadway every year around Christmas. One especially impactful show Alvino recalls seeing with his family was Billy Elliot. “That was just young boys who looked just like me that were dancing,” he says. “That’s when it kind of shifted for me, because that’s when I started dancing. And I was like, ‘Hm, maybe I could do that.’”
Alvino grew up in a family of athletes, and as a child, he experimented with every sport under the sun — swimming was his favorite, he says, “because it was not contact.” At age 13, he started dancing competitively, and throughout high school, he practiced dancing for six hours a night every weekday.
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“It was so fun to me and normal in my schedule. It was long hours, but it never felt like work,” Alvino says. “I was like, ‘Oh, I love doing this,’ but now thinking about it, I guess I really did put in the hours for it.”
After graduation, Alvino headed to Montclair State University to study dance, where he quickly befriended many of the school’s musical theatre majors. By his sophomore year, they’d rubbed off on him, and he added a musical theatre degree to his own academic courseload.
But Alvino’s education was cut short after only three semesters, and with good reason: He booked a role on Broadway in the ensemble of the Hugh Jackman-led revival of The Music Man.
“It didn’t feel real to me because it happened so fast,” Alvino says. “And I didn’t really study musical theater, I kind of just knew I could dance really well, and then I sang a little bit with my friends and stuff, but nothing serious. And it was my first audition ever, like, professional audition — wild.”
Alvino did eventually take to the stage in The Music Man when it opened on Broadway in 2022 — but first, he had the pandemic to contend with. It delayed the show’s opening by a year, leaving Alvino, who’d left college to be in the production, with plenty of time on his hands.
It was in that pre-Music Man break that Alvino, like so many Gen Zers fighting off boredom in 2020, turned to TikTok to fill his time. His dancing videos quickly went viral, and five years later, he has nearly 500,000 followers on the app, not to mention 40,000 fans on Instagram. Though Alvino has devoted less time to social media since his professional theater career took off, he doesn’t take the power of his platform for granted.
“With this industry, it’s really freelance, so you never know what’s going to come your way,” he reflects. “Like, your month can look completely empty, and then you could just get one DM and it can just change your whole schedule. But that’s really a plus of having a following or really putting time into social media — but I never thought it was something that I needed or wanted. It kind of just happened.”
Still, social media played a part in connecting Alvino with his second Broadway production: Death Becomes Her. The Tony-winning musical, an adaptation of the camp classic ‘90s film of the same name, has gone viral over and over again for its hilarious lyrics. Take the song “Tell Me, Ernest.” If you’ve been on the internet in the past few months, it’s been near impossible not to hear Megan Hilty’s pitch-perfect delivery of “How much have you seen of me … cinematically?”
Alvino is no exception. He had already seen Death Becomes Her on Broadway (“The curtain came up, and I was like, ‘These people are so hot and so cool,’” he remembers thinking), and when the singles from its cast recording started hitting the internet, he realized “Tell Me, Ernest” would be a perfect fit for a routine at his first-ever dance class in New York City.
Alvino took an interest in choreography after being in The Music Man, as — once again — he found himself with lots of free time. “You have to do your survival jobs, but I felt like I needed to do something more creative to fill that part of my brain,” he explains. “It also just makes you feel good, like you’re putting something out in the world.”
So, Alvino started teaching dance classes in Long Island and New Jersey. It wasn’t until early this year that he taught his first NYC class, where his choreography to “Tell Me, Ernest” caught folks’ attention across the internet.
“A lot of the people from the [Death Becomes Her] team just commented, and it was all super sweet,” he says. “But I didn’t know anything about being in the show — I never thought I would be in the show.”
Fate, of course, had other plans. A friend of Alvino’s, a casting director, threw his name into the ring to be an immediate replacement in Death Becomes Her, and with just 24 hours’ notice, Alvino was one of only five actors at the audition.
“I had a flight the next day [after the audition] to go to Mexico City with friends. I had the trip planned,” Alvino recalls. “I was like, ‘I need to know soon if I got it, because I have to cancel and tell them that I’m not coming.’”
“I kind of was just waiting around my phone for hours, and then finally they called me,” he continues. “They were like, ‘Okay, you can cancel your fight.’”
In March, Alvino made his debut in the ensemble of Death Becomes Her. “Just to be a fan of the show and then finally be in it, I was like, ‘This is so surreal,’” he says.
Though Alvino’s casting was based entirely on his talent, he acknowledges that his viral choreography didn’t hurt his chances. “In a way, it did help, the video that I posted from the show, because they all knew of me — and they all really liked the video, thank god,” he says. “Everything just worked out. I guess that’s, in a way, manifesting, just putting something out there. I was like, ‘What show should I do next? I’ll make a combo to it. We’ll see!’”
Alvino’s time in Death Becomes Her had no shortage of highlights, including acting as a stunt double for Jennifer Simard during one of the musical’s iconic fight sequences (“I had my whole breastplate,” he recalls. “I loved it. I was like, ‘I might get into drag after this.’”), but Alvino’s favorite aspect of the Death Becomes Her experience had to be the costumes, he says.
When he joined the cast, Alvino was fitted with a custom “immortal suit,” the uniform of Death Becomes Her’s ensemble. The show’s Tony-winning costumes were designed by Paul Tazewell (who also won an Oscar this year for his work on Wicked), and Alvino says receiving one made especially for him felt like a milestone moment.
“Mine is fully exposed, which I was happy about,” Alvino says of his costume. “I was like, ‘I don’t care. I’m not gonna look like this forever; I might as well show it off!’ But it was so amazing. There’s so many costumes, and they’re all just super sparkly and fun and fitted. It kind of felt like an immortal suit was a badge of honor. It was like, ‘This is yours.’”
Alvino also appreciated that Death Becomes Her is, as he puts it, a “gay show.” The musical may not feature any explicitly queer characters, but any given audience member is likely to agree with Alvino: that show is queer as folk.
“Its target audience is a gay audience, and we just celebrate it so heavily,” Alvino says, pointing to Death Becomes Her’s first big production number “For The Gaze,” which was recently featured at the Tony Awards. That song featured another iconic costume for Alvino: a monochrome suit with a tearaway panel on the butt, which served as a surprise for his family when they saw him in the show.
“I didn’t tell my parents anything about the show, and they saw it, and they loved it, which was so amazing, and they had a great time. My whole family did,” he says. “But I was like, ‘They’re looking at my ass right now. This is so weird.’”
From the beginning, Alvino knew he only had a limited time in Death Becomes Her. He left the show in April after about a month of performances, but his career has shown no signs of slowing down. From a recent showing in NBC’s upfronts, to an upcoming performance in the iconic fundraiser Broadway Bares (which you can donate to here), Alvino has plenty to keep him busy even off of Broadway stages.
“Now that I have more time, I’m going to start creating more and posting more and having classes and stuff like that,” he says. In the long-term, he’s considering a career in choreography: “I think down the road, that’s something I want to explore more and be on the creative side of Broadway. But I want to perform all my 20s and 30s until I can’t dance anymore, and then once my knees are not bending anymore, then I’ll be on that side. But it’s nice to get to meet all these choreographers now and assist them.”
“I am going to start to get into acting, too,” he adds — and he laughs when I point out the irony of saying he’ll “get into acting” after being in two Broadway musicals.
“I always say this: I’m meant to be an actor on TV and film, because that’s where the money is and I feel like I have a great look for it,” he explains. “I think dream world, I would be a season regular on a TV show or something like that. Like, I’m so game for all of that. And like, I just want people to know who I am. I want to make my mark in the industry, whether that be TV, film, or social media. I’m really open to anything.”
In the meantime, he’s grateful to be a part of Broadway’s growing Gen Z cohort. From the ensembles of shows like Romeo + Juliet and John Proctor Is the Villain, to young stars making their debuts in leading roles like Helen J Shen in Maybe Happy Ending and Jasmine Amy Rogers in Boop! The Musical, Alvino is excited to see newcomers getting their well-deserved flowers.
“I think it’s so amazing. It’s hard to get into the industry. Like, it seems like there’s always the same people that are booking the shows, but they have to start somewhere,” he says. “There’s just so much talent out there, and it shouldn’t be isolated to people who have experience. Like, there’s people who are in college that are like, if you’re right for the part, you’re right for the part.”
Gen Z may be coming to Broadway, but is Broadway ready for Gen Z? Even Death Becomes Her has its lighthearted digs at Gen Z: In a dramatic number aptly titled “Falling Apart,” Hilty as Madeline Ashton has a manic episode that includes scoffing at “fricking Gen Z” and begging to steal a twenty-something’s skin.
“They always kind of hate on us,” Alvino notes. “But I think that for us, if we don’t like something, we’re just not going to do it, or we’re going to change it, or we’re going to fix it. For Gen Zs, I don’t feel like we settle, which is pretty powerful.”
“For me, at least, I will put everything I have into something that I love doing until that fulfills me. And then if it does, I’m like, ‘Okay, what’s next?’” he continues. “We’re always trying to do the next thing, always trying to make things happen. I’m really into finding new ways to grow.” ♦
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