Meet Your New Fave Broadway Couple: Beautiful's Jarrod Spector & Doctor Zhivago's Kelli Barrett

A typical night in for Broadway couple Jarrod Spector and Kelli Barrett might include a game of Carcassonne, a marathon of House of Cards or a feast of celery and peanut butter. But nights in are few and far between for the busy newlyweds: Tony nominee Spector stars as the hypochondriacal Barry Mann in Beautiful, while Barrett is gearing up to open in the new musical Doctor Zhivago, in which she plays Lara Guishar, Zhivago’s paramour. The couple (feel free to call them Sparrett) invited Broadway.com into their stunning Harlem apartment—festooned with remote-control flameless candles—and then grossed us out by being utterly gorgeous, finishing each other’s sentences, cracking everyone up and just being disgustingly perfect in a way that makes you want to be best friends with them forever. Vomit, you guys. (Also, call us! We want to play Carcassonne with you!)

Q. WHAT WAS YOUR FIRST DATE?
JARROD: It wasn’t a date. We were still not dating. We had a series of unofficial dates, but we went to see Sleep No More on one of our first nights out.
KELLI: We were friends!
JARROD: We went to Sleep No More and ended up at the Westway Diner until 4:30 in the morning. You know, like friends do.
KELLI: Not dating.
JARROD: Not at all.



Q: WHY WERE YOU ON NON-DATES?
JARROD: We met doing a reading of Piece of My Heart in 2010. We both were with other people at the time, so nothing was going to happen, of course. We met in April and then in December of that same year [2010], we did another reading, and that was the end of that. I just was in love with her.
KELLI: I had no idea how he felt at all. We became good friends. Before we ended up together, we were texting every day and playing Words with Friends and threatening each other’s lives.
JARROD: Like you do.

Q: THREATENING EACH OTHER’S LIVES?
KELLI: You know—kind of pulling each other’s pigtails.
JARROD: Right. When you can’t reference the sexual tension, you just threaten one another’s lives. One day we were texting, and I was like, “I’m going to go take a nap.” And she wrote, “Fine. Sleep forever.” I thought that was the funniest thing ever. In retrospect, it was really kind of creepy.



Q. DID YOU HAVE AN AHA MOMENT?
KELLI: I was folding laundry in my apartment in Astoria and we were chatting on the phone. He said, “You know you’re the Sally to my Harry, right?” The phone dropped, and I had that moment where I was like, “Oh my God, is that what this is?”

Q. DID YOU DO A LOT OF VOTING IN BROADWAY.COM’S SEXIEST MAN ALIVE POLL?
KELLI: You want to know something funny? When I voted, I accidentally clicked on [Spector's former Beautiful co-star] Jake Epstein. He was like, “Did you just click on Jake?!”
JARROD: The most basic of computer polls is beyond your grasp.

Q. HOW DOES IT FEEL TO WATCH EACH OTHER GET ROMANTIC ON STAGE WITH A CO-STAR?
JARROD: It’s not always the easiest thing in the world. I think we’re doing as well as human beings can be expected to do. And it does come with the territory.
KELLI: We’ve said to each other—as hard as that conversation would be—if we start to feel something for a co-star, we have to tell each other and not get all offended by it and jealous. It was in our vows, actually.
JARROD: Kelli’s vows were very specific about co-stars.



Q. WHAT’S YOUR DREAM SHOW TO DO TOGETHER?
KELLI: Gosh, that's really hard. Parade would be unbelievable.
JARROD: Kelli has done two readings of Anastasia with two different leading men, but to play opposite one another as Anastasia and Dmitri would absolutely be a dream. And my ancestors are Russian, so, you know, type casting.



Q. WHAT DOES IT FEEL LIKE TO WATCH EACH OTHER ON STAGE?
KELLI: It feels like my child is performing in a strange way. I know that sounds weird. That’s the closest I can get to understanding what it would be like to be a mother.
JARROD: Minus the incest.
KELLI: I have a huge talent crush on him.
JARROD: As my parents say, I kvell when I watch her.