Todd McKenney is one of Australia’s best-known performers, a dancer, singer, actor and television personality.
Raised in Perth, where his mother ran a dancing school, and having trained from childhood, Todd represented Western Australia in ballroom championships, including dancing for Australia in England – twice.
Todd left Perth in 1983 for Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Song and Dance, opening at the Adelaide Festival Centre, and did not go back. Cast as Peter Allen in The Boy from Oz when he was still an unknown, playing the role for 1,076 performances across three years, and was a judge on Dancing with the Stars for twenty-one years.
Recent stage work includes Cats, and The Odd Couple with Shane Jacobson, and now having moved to Melbourne, is currently on ABC Radio Melbourne, filling in for Jacinta Parsons.
David Hunt and Todd talk about a Perth childhood spent at school by day and a dance studio into the night; a mother with a reputation for knowing how to teach boys how to dance; a household liberal enough to allow his secret boyfriend to stay; schoolyard bullying that stopped after his name was added to the gym honours board; The Boy from Oz, and producer Ben Gannon who cast a nobody in the lead, and that special closing night in Sydney; not getting that Broadway role; Dancing with the Stars, and his character that put him in the country’s lounge rooms; Todd Masks and Todd+Creates, the platforms he built during Covid to support closed theatre workers; and now, a calculated year off from theatre; learning talk radio; circling plays; greyhounds, and Fitzroy.