Vanderbilt Programming Board will host the 61st annual IMPACT Symposium speaker series featuring actor Gaten Matarazzo on March 20 and actress Cynthia Erivo on April 3 in Langford Auditorium. As students logged in to claim free student tickets through the Sarratt Box Office at 12 p.m. CST on March 5, the website quickly crashed, and tickets for Erivo’s event were later made purchasable while Matarazzo’s remained free.
Matarazzo began his career on Broadway at age eight. He is known for his portrayal of Dustin Henderson in the Netflix series “Stranger Things.” He returned to Broadway in 2022, joining the final cast of “Dear Evan Hansen” as Jared Kleinman. In 2017, he won a Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Drama Series for “Stranger Things.”
Erivo recently portrayed Elphaba in the film adaptation of the musical “Wicked.” She debuted in the West End theater in the early 2010s and later portrayed Celie in the Broadway revival of “The Color Purple,” earning a Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical, a Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Musical Performance in a Daytime Program and a Grammy Award for Best Musical Theater Album. Erivo’s other acting credits include Harriet Tubman in “Harriet” and Aretha Franklin in “Genius: Aretha.”
Tickets for both events went on sale at 12 p.m. CST on March 5. The website quickly crashed as students flooded to claim the free student tickets. Anyone on the website was placed on a “priority queue.” After a few minutes, a 404 error message appeared with the message, “The resource you are looking for might have been removed, had its name changed or is temporarily unavailable.” The website eventually reloaded, and the claiming process was removed. Tickets for Erivo’s talk sold out, while tickets for Matarazzo’s talk are still available, as of publication.
Emily Qian, a senior, explained how she was never able to obtain a ticket for Erivo’s talk before the event sold out.
“I opened up the link, and it put me in a waitlist, but then the link expired or went invalid,” Qian said. “So I never got around to getting a ticket.”
Students who obtained a ticket to Erivo’s talk received an email from VPB at 1:51 p.m. CST on March 5 stating that there was an error with some of the tickets.
“Due to an unexpected technical issue, some tickets were processed incorrectly,” the email reads. “As a result, all previously secured tickets have been invalidated.”
Students were given a link to repurchase tickets before the event went back online for public sale at 9 p.m. CST on March 5. Student tickets are $10, followed by $15 for faculty and staff and $20 for general admission. All tickets for students were previously free, and remaining tickets for Matarazzo’s event are still free for students.
VPB did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Hallie Jacobson, a senior, also expressed difficulties with the ticketing process.
“I am a huge ‘Wicked’ and Cynthia [Erivo] fan, and I definitely was experiencing distress around the whole incident yesterday,” Jacobson said. “I was able to eventually secure tickets to both [events], but I had to pay for my Cynthia [Erivo] ticket.”
