Next time you go to a musical theatre production, take a few minutes to consider how the actors in the lead roles may have been inspired to adopt their characters and give their best performance.
In ‘We Will Rock You’, do you think the actor playing Freddie Mercury ever met the man he’s portraying? Probably not. Mercury died in 1991.
Did the stars of Jersey Boys meet Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons? Quite possibly actually – Frankie Valli, Bob Gaudio, Robby Robinson and Gerry Polci are all still alive.
Did the stars of Hamilton ever meet Alexander Hamilton? Of course not. Hamilton died in 1804.
Did the stars of The Lion King… forget it. You know what I mean.
But for Todd McKenney, one of Australia’s most beloved and celebrated musical theatre and professional dance stars, the story is different. He met Peter Allen on several occasions and spent many hours listening to him, long before knowing he would go on to portray him on stage 1,076 times in ‘The Boy From Oz’ – arguably McKenney’s breakout role.
In a unique twist, McKenney’s best friend’s brother is married to Peter Allen’s sister. It might seem like a six-degrees-of-separation line, but sometimes the lines between art and reality are not so blurred after all.
“I had a lot to do with him,” McKenney recalls. He saw Allen perform five times, twice met him backstage, and once famously found himself at a Bondi barbecue where “they rang me and said, ‘Come down, there’s someone you’ll want to meet,’ and I came down and it was Peter Allen.”
Long before he would slip into sequins and command sold-out theatres as arguably Australia’s most famous “Boy from Oz”, McKenney was a kid from Perth whose life revolved around one thing: dance.
“My mum had a dancing school in Perth,” he says. “[I did] school and was then in the car at 3:30 and off to the dance studio until nine or 10 o’clock every day.”
This was not a hobby. It was a regime. His mother ran what he calls a “power school” – students didn’t “fluff around up the back”. This was serious. They did five, six, seven classes a week. Weekdays were technique; Saturdays were marathon dance days; Sundays were ballroom championships.
While his father moved from car salesman to warden at Fremantle Jail, Todd followed his mother’s path instead. Dance wasn’t just an interest – it was oxygen.
The 1970s were not always kind to a boy in ballroom shoes. “There weren’t a lot of boys in the dance world at that point,” he says. “I copped a bit of grief at school.”
But success is a powerful silencer. When he and his partner began representing Western Australia at national championships, competing with and against the likes of Sonia Kruger, who was representing Queensland, the teasing faded.
Then, when he began representing Australia at international competitions in the UK, McKenney became a name on the school’s representative board. Suddenly, the boy they mocked was the boy travelling the world. By 15, he and his partner were sixth in the world in Latin dancing.
Ballroom, at that point, still felt like a niche world to many Australians. That would soon change.
In 1992, McKenney made a notable leap from competitive ballroom to the big screen when he appeared in Baz Luhrmann’s breakout film Strictly Ballroom. He played the role of Nathan Starkey, a ballroom dancer, bringing his real-life dance experience to a movie that became a touchstone for Australian dance culture. That early film role connected his competitive dance background with a cinematic portrayal of the very world he had grown up in and hinted at the broader theatrical career that would follow.
But even at such a tender age, a crossroads moment presented itself. Continue climbing the global ballroom ladder, or pivot towards the theatre?
Fate intervened in the form of an audition for a musical in Adelaide. He got it, and that was it. The die was cast.
The show was Andrew Lloyd Webber’s ‘Song and Dance’, with McKenney cast primarily as a dancer. “I hadn’t ever sung before,” he admits. “Singing scared the pants off me.”
It would not scare him for long.
Colleagues told him bluntly: if you want a career in this industry, you need to sing. So, he learned. He discovered that standing on stage and opening your mouth to music is “quite a vulnerable thing to do.”
It was a lesson in exposure – one that would serve him decades later in front of millions of television viewers.
His first taste of musical theatre as an audience member had been as a 14-year-old watching The Rocky Horror Show at His Majesty’s Theatre in Perth. Outrageous, flamboyant, daring. But even earlier, at just 12, his mother had taken him to see Peter Allen perform. That concert would prove prophetic.
When ‘The Boy From Oz’ was in development, McKenney auditioned in London for the lead role as Allen. He didn’t get it. The role went to another actor.
A year later, the production team called him back. This time, they were rethinking what they wanted. “We don’t want somebody with his skills,” they told him. They wanted someone who could be themselves on stage – because that was Allen’s magic.
The audition day came with its own blessing. On his way to the airport, Allen’s sister Lynne asked him to stop by. Their mother handed him three of Peter’s famous sequinned shirts and a note that read, ‘If anyone’s going to play my son, I hope it’s you.’
You couldn’t script it better.
McKenney understood something crucial about Allen – something that can’t be taught. The trap, he says, is not to overplay the flamboyance – something he said he has seen in others who have played Allen in other adaptations of the show.
“You’re already covered in sequins… and then to bang on gay on the top, I think is a mistake.”
Allen, he insists, was not a caricature. He was simply himself – outrageous, funny, razor sharp, but authentic. The key to portraying him was not imitation, but zest. Director Gale Edwards told McKenney she didn’t want a Peter Allen impersonator. She wanted someone with the same joy for the stage.
That distinction unlocked everything.
“I care about Peter Allen,” McKenney says. “He gave me my career posthumously.”
Over three years, he performed the show 1,076 times, to more than 1.3 million people in its original season. It grossed $60 million.
But beyond box office numbers, it taught him something else: how to talk to an audience.
Musical theatre often hides behind the fourth wall. The Boy From Oz demanded direct engagement. “That taught me how to talk to an audience,” he says, adding that the experience helped sharpen the skills he would use in the coming years on television and radio.
“And that’s what I did on radio and then that’s what I did on Dancing with the Stars for 20 years.”
When Hugh Jackman later took The Boy from Oz to Broadway and global critical acclaim, McKenney publicly supported him, despite media attempts to manufacture rivalry. He’d performed the role over a thousand times. There was nothing more to prove.
If The Boy From Oz made him a star, television made him unavoidable.
His judging role on Dancing with the Stars came almost by accident. After expressing interest in television to a friend, the brief for a ballroom dancing show landed on his desk that same afternoon.
For nearly 21 years, McKenney developed a persona as the sharp-tongued judge audiences loved – or loved to hate.
“Some of the things I said were appalling,” he laughs now. “I’d be cancelled in 10 seconds.”
He was never instructed to be harsh. He simply saw where he fit on the panel. One judge was heartfelt, another glamorous, another technical. McKenney provided colour. And Australia responded.
With audiences of nearly three million, he couldn’t walk through an airport lounge without comment. Some viewers confronted him in the Qantas Club, demanding explanations for criticisms of their favourite celebrities.
But the notoriety had a silver lining. It filled theatres. People came to see whether the man on television could actually perform, and of course, he could.
Now into the fifth decade of his illustrious career, McKenney finds himself back in Cats. The show that, in the 1980s, cast him as an acrobatic young kitten today sees him playing Gus, the ageing theatre cat reminiscing about past glories.
“I went from playing the youngest cat… and now 40 years later, I’m the oldest person in the show.”
His fellow cast members acknowledge him as a source of wisdom and experience, even if some offer backhanded compliments by asking what the show was like “in his day”.
McKenney responded to that exchange with an impassioned “it’s still my day, sweetheart”.
It is a poignant symmetry. Back then, he was backflipping across the stage. Today, he relies on nuance, experience, and stagecraft honed over thousands of performances.
“I’ve now got a direct comparison to what I knew back then to what I know now,” he says.
“I had another guy in Grease who said to me: “Oh the audience loves you.”
“I said ‘well thank God because it’d be awful if they were slow clapping me when I walked out.’
“And he said, ‘you could shit on the stage and they’d like you’.
“I laughed, turned around and I went hang on a second. No, that’s not a thing. The reason they like me is because I’ve had 40 years of experience and I know what I’m doing.”
The hunger to be front and centre has softened. The integrity has not.
“I don’t need to be the one in the spotlight anymore,” he says.
There is contentment in that admission. McKenney has felt what it’s like to be the motor of a show, to carry eight performances a week for years, to check his voice anxiously each morning. He has known fame, money, adulation, and pressure.
Now he enjoys mentoring by example. Turning up on time. Being polite. Doing the work.
If he could speak to the boy rushing from school to dance class, he would offer simple advice: “Relax. Chill out. It’s all going to be fine.” It is advice hard-earned.
Todd McKenney’s life has been peaks and pivots: a Perth dance school, global ballroom competitions, sequins in the West End, sharp critiquing on a primetime dance show and even playing ‘Percy Penguin’ on a children’s television show in Western Australia. But threading through it all is authenticity – the same quality he admired in Peter Allen.
Perhaps that is why he was the right man to keep Allen’s music alive. Not because he could mimic him, but because he understood him.
And next time you sit in a theatre and watch a performer command the stage, spare a thought for the years of discipline, doubt, and daring that brought them there.
For Todd McKenney, it began with a 12-year-old boy watching Peter Allen in a Perth concert hall.
The rest, as they say, was show business.
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