Todd McKenney opens up about life on centre stage and why he’s never been happier

The Boy from Oz will be a role Todd McKenney will forever be remembered for but there has been so much more to delight in as he celebrates a special anniversary.

It’s been 40 toe-tapping years, but Todd McKenney remembers his first time on stage like it was yesterday. He’d left his Perth home to audition for Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Song and Dance in Adelaide, and got the job. So on June 21, 1983, a wide-eyed 18-year-old McKenney stepped foot onto the stage – a place he now calls home.

Four decades later he’s not only still shining – he’s got a body of work most musical theatre hopefuls can only dream of. And for the first time, feels confident in his ability to do exactly what he does best – and for the erstwhile Boy From Oz, that now means taking on the Wizard of Oz, in Wicked.

“Do you know what? I’m just in that really happy place,” 58-year-old McKenney tells Sydney Weekend from his Pymble home.

“I know what I do, I know how to do it, I love what I do and I play in so many different worlds … And one of the things that really dawned on me during the Wicked rehearsals was … I know what I’m doing.

“Before – a role like this, being so iconic, would have scared me and I would have had a struggle trying to be this character. But in the rehearsal room, I’m not me. I’m playing this character who is definitely not me, and it feels really great to play in another world.

“But I feel very grown up. I feel very grown up as an actor – and that’s the first time I’ve really felt like that. And not in a conceited way – it’s a comfortable feeling to go ‘I’ve got this’.”

Todd McKenney celebrating 40 years of life on the big stage. Picture: David Swift.

As “the dance teacher’s son”, McKenney’s life as a dancer started at the age of three at the back of his mother Peta’s Perth dancing school. He later represented Australia in ballroom and Latin American dancing, winning many international dance titles.

His darling Peta lives on the Gold Coast, so Queensland often comes calling.

“Mum was never a pushy stage mother – I always wanted to dance and I always wanted to be good and I worked hard at it – but I was always the kid that got the lesson at 10pm at night before the eisteddfod the next day, when everyone else had their lessons before,” he says.

“I was that kid – the son of the dance teacher.

“But she’s as proud as punch and the industry loves her. Nearly everyone in the industry knows my mum.

“They all think she’s absolutely gorgeous, because she’s also a straight shooter, so she has no qualms about telling John Frost she didn’t like the show, and I’m like ‘Mum!’.

“So she rings me now and says ‘can you get me opening night tickets for Wicked or shall I ring Frosty?’.

“Or I’ll see Frosty and he’ll be like ‘your mum called me yesterday’ and I’m like ‘oh no’,” he groans.

The Boy From Oz.

Todd McKenney as Teen Angel.

“She’s sassy – and she’s incredibly proud. My mum grew up in Perth so quite removed from the entertainment capital of Australia, so I think she would have been a really brilliant performer herself but never got the chance to do it.

“So whenever I can, I try and include her in things like appearing on the Morning Show, or I took her on Studio 10 one day, or if I do radio interviews and she’s in town, I’d say, ‘come and sit in the studio’ – and I see her light up.”

While deep down McKenney knows he was always destined for the stage – lucky he was born in the right family, he laughs – it was a completely different industry he tackled after leaving school – just in case.

“I’m a worker – I think whatever career I would have gone into, I would have probably just sunk my teeth into it – but I had the luxury of growing up in the right family to start with,” he says.

“My mum was a dancing teacher, my grandmother was a dancing teacher, and I loved dancing.

“It was never a chore for me to be in the studio and do my homework in the little kitchen of the studio, and then go and do a tap class, and come back and finish my homework and go back and do an acrobatic class, or a ballroom class – I loved it.

“And mum was, I think, one of the best dance teachers in the country – a lot of her students now work all over the world, she’s got leading roles on Broadway, so I just had the most amazing luck being born into the right family.”

Even so, McKenney trained up as a travel agent when he left school.

“Mum wanted me to have something to fall back on, so I worked for a travel agency called New Horizons in Perth, and I went to TAFE and did my fares and ticketing and travel agent practice stuff, so I had that and I worked in the travel agency for about 18 months.

Todd McKenney with one of his childhood dance partners.

“And then I got this role in the show, so I left that and never looked back.”

His mum, who is about to turn 80, still calls herself a “war baby” and ever the sensible one, saved every penny she could – a trait that may well have skipped a generation.

“I don’t have that gene,” McKenney laughs.

“That’s probably why I work so much – I’ve got a massive mortgage and money sort of flows in and flows out, whereas my mum is the sensible one.

“She made me buy my first house when I got my first decent wage which was in 1989 in 42nd Street the musical.

“And I remember I was on $1100 a week – it was the first time I ever cracked the $1000 a week mark and I was gonna go and spend it on art or clothes and mum said ‘no you’re not, you’re buying an apartment’.

“So I bought a two-bedroom apartment in Bondi right on the beach for $152,000 and I was cursing my mum because I wanted to spend this money instead of put it into real estate – but then eight years later I sold it for $1.7m.”

Home is now in Pymble on Sydney’s upper north shore, in a “beautiful old 1900s farmhouse”, where he lives with his two dogs.

“It’s a dream of a house,” he says.

“And I have a house on the Hawkesbury – a little fishing shack on the Hawkesbury River, and that’s my getaway, go-to happy place – you get to it by water only and there are just 12 houses in the settlement and it’s quite remote and I just love it to bits.

Shane Jacobson, and Todd McKenney. Picture: Jeff Busby

“Then my daughter lives in Melbourne so I’m in Melbourne a lot.”

In 2007, he became a father to Charlotte – the “light of his life”.

“I just did seven months in Melbourne actually with Cinderella and then straight into Hairspray, and I’ll be in Melbourne again with Wicked, so I get to spend time with her then and she does come to Sydney.

“But I’m Sydney through and through.”

The Boy From Oz took up three years of McKenney’s life, resulting in 766 shows – a massive feat “at that level, in that role in that show”, he admits – but hard to follow.

“I finished that and had a bit of a ‘oh my god, what do I do now?’ moment,” he says.

“In one way, you’ve been handed the gift of a lifetime, which it really turned out to be – but you’ve got to stay up there.

“So I had to really navigate that, mentally. Like, how do you do that? I had really good people around me, so between The Boy From Oz and Dancing with the Stars, I had a great manager who said ‘get out on the road and be yourself – put a band together’.

“That’s a different style of performing. It’s not the major mega multimillion dollar musical ‘star of the show’ thing – but it was another avenue of employment, and also a great way of connecting with your audience because then they see you as you. And so I did.

“I put a show together called Feeling Myself Again, and talked about my life and sang songs. That started me (one the road to the) one-man show … and that’s now one of my favourite things to do.

“So in between big musicals I get that show out, or a version of it, with my band, who I’ve been working with for the last 14 years, and we go around the clubs and do regional theatres and perform as myself, so that was really good advice to put that together.

“It’s a privilege – and I also love it because you’re going into people’s local areas. So they haven’t had to drive, it’s not a thousand dollar night – they’re at their club, they’ve had their dinner, they’ve had a couple of wines, they’re sitting down and might have a bottle of champagne during the show, so it’s got a very chatty dinner party feel.

“And I think that’s the point of a one-man show – is to have the audience leave having feeling like they’ve actually met you.”

McKenney has taken home bags of awards for his long cast of shows, and shares his experiences with those and as a judge on Seven’s Dancing With The Stars.

Todd McKenney with his mum Peta. .

“It’s been amazing – I mean, 40 years,” he tells Sydney Weekend of his life in lights.

“I remember the date, I remember clear as a bell, I can see myself walking in on the 21st of June in 1983.

“I started at the Adelaide Festival Centre and I remember walking in for the very first time and met the cast of that show – many of them who are still friends of mine today, Rhonda Burchmore being one – that was her first show as well, so we both started our careers on that day, and she has remained one of my dearest friends over the decades.

“I actually called her up, because she didn’t realise that we were celebrating that milestone – and I said ‘what are you doing next Wednesday – you’re coming to Sydney’ – and she had no idea why she was coming.

“And she arrived and I got all these friends around and I pulled them all in and they went ‘What are we doing here?’ – and I said, ‘it’s a celebration of 40 years in the business’ – and she burst into tears.”

Celebrate they did. And what an “incredibly rewarding” career they honoured.

“I’ve gone back to the Adelaide Festival Centre with so many shows over the years and they have this tradition where they put cast photos all down the corridors and backstage and green room areas of the shows that have been there – so when I walk through the corridors of the Adelaide Festival Centre, I see my career laid out on the walls,” he said.

“It’s been really beautiful.”

From Song and Dance to Wicked. It’s been a huge four decades for Todd McKenney. Picture: Hugh Stewart

He labels Wicked a “phenomenon” that bucks the trend of smaller shows, smaller budgets. The sheer scale of the show is unique to modern musicals of late, he says, saying it could have a massive five-year run.

“In musical theatre over the last decade, the productions have been getting smaller (because of) financial stresses everywhere, but just being in the rehearsal room … the scale of this show, even something as simple as the size of the cast,” he says. “I mean, this has a massive cast. We just don’t see musicals on this scale anymore.

“And having said that, John Frost said to me it’s breaking box office records – and they could get five years out of it all around the country and in Asia. So I picked a good one. And I’m only on stage for 16 minutes,” he laughs.

He says for the next generation, the internet and social media gives musical theatre hopefuls greater accessibility – which he says may mean added anxiety.

“It’s a hard one, because I think in many respects, the global world we live in via the internet gives kids a vision for the future for them, but in many ways, I think it could give them a false vision,” he says.

“See, we never knew what was going on. So we just would turn up, peddle our wares at the audition and cross our fingers and then go home. But these days, kids can see fame, they can see success.

“They can see internet sensations, social media sensations and all that – so I actually think there’s another level of anxiety, because they can see where they want to get to on their screens, but they want to get there too quick.

“Whereas my generation growing up, we just slowly climbed the ladder, without really knowing what the goal was because we weren’t looking at it every day online.”

It’s also apt, he says, that he’s marking his 40 years at Sydney’s Lyric Theatre – another place steeped in tradition for him.

“When I did the Boy From Oz, that ticked so many boxes for me – that gave me the feeling of what being the star of the show feels like, and what running a show and being the motor of a show feels like,” he says.

“It also gave me the feeling of what it’s like to be a star – because I was playing Peter Allen and a lot of that show was him in concert talking to the audience and getting the reaction of 2000 people, even though I was playing him – so I had that experience.

“And that opened the doors into television, so I’ve had the celebrity experience.

“So I’ve ticked a lot of boxes that I didn’t know I wanted to tick – so as far as a particular role goes, there’s not really anything I look at going ‘I’ve got a burning desire to do that’. But there’s this funny little thing in my mind.

“At the Lyric Theatre in Sydney, Stephen Found owns the theatre and Graeme Kearns is the general manager – love them – they are so supportive and they treat the people who come into their theatre so well. They started this tradition where they put a plaque with the person, the role they played and the production and year they were in – and they put a plaque outside their dressing rooms.

“So when I go to either the Capitol Theatre or the Lyric, my name is outside a number of the doors.

“There are nine dressing rooms and I said to Graeme the other day, ‘You know what? My aim is to get my name outside every door’ – and then I’m retiring.

“I’m outside five of them, but I’ve got four doors left. So until that happens, on I’ll be swinging away on stage.”

Wicked opens at Sydney’s Lyric Theatre on August 25

Originally published as Todd McKenney opens up about life on centre stage and why he’s never been happier