It's obvious that Bobby Steggert is beginning to feel very much at home in the bowels of Lincoln Center. He's in the very dressing room that he had less than a year ago when he appeared in their production of A. R. Gurney's delightful play THE GRAND MANNER. Now he's playing Eugene Marchbanks in Joshua Schmidt and Jan Levy Tranen's A MINISTER's WIFE; a musical treatment of George Bernard Shaw's CANDIDA which opened on Sunday, May 8th.
Steggert is a genial fellow and it's hard to believe he's just turned 30. His youthfulness is accentuated as he sits on a chair with his legs crossed under him, yielding a favorable comparison to Peter Pan. Has Bobby Steggert found a Fountain of Youth that's more effective than the one Ponce de Leon supposedly unearthed in St. Augustine, Florida?
Steggert laughs heartily as he replies: "My parents are in their 60's and look like they're in their mid-forties so genetically I'm very lucky!" He pauses for a moment and then adds, "As a young person--knowingly without the perspective of age--it can be annoying to not be taken as seriously as you sometimes hope. I'm told, though, that I'll enjoy it more and more as the years go by."
How long will he retain the boyish moniker of "Bobby" Steggert? "You know I graduated from NYU and was deciding what agent to go with and felt that I wanted to go by the name of ‘Robert'. I was going to be ‘Robert Dietrich Steggert' because I thought it would be a great stage name. My headshots and my resume all said ‘Robert Dietrich Steggert' and I chose a great agent but one of the first things she said was, ‘I want you to take a look in the mirror and tell me who you see. I looked into the mirror and said, ‘Of course I see "Bobby" that's what everyone calls me.' She continued by saying ‘The best thing you can do in this business is to represent yourself authentically and it might be a little juvenile when you're 40 but you'll already be successful by then being Bobby Steggert won't ring as childish, it'll just ring as your name." Certainly with two Tony Award nominations to his credit, no one is criticizing Bobby Cannevale for his name choice.
A native of Frederick, Maryland, Steggert's father worked an hour away in Washington, DC. "I grew up my entire 18 years in Frederick so I had a very steady childhood. He also had a very intelligent childhood because when he was graduated from Frederick High School, Bobby Steggert was named valedictorian of his class. "I always loved school," he recalls. "I was a real nerd: I loved writing reports and doing projects. I loved it all. I really did!"
As with many performers, Steggert's interest in the performing arts dates back to his younger years. "I did a little opera called AMAHL AND THE NIGHT VISITORS by Giancarlo Menotti. It was a Christmas opera in which I had no idea what the hell I was doing. Not only that, I played the title role. I was an honest-to-goodness boy soprano in those days. After the performance I recall being very shaken because I didn't remember a thing about it. My parents, Mary and Bob, had the forethought to say, ‘If you were so transported you don't even remember what happened, you should keep doing it.' It was a wonderful bit of advice and I'm grateful I trusted them. I guess you could say that they were the opposite of most parents who would back their kids away from the performing arts. They trusted that I had a real penchant for this profession and I credit them greatly for that."
Despite his debut singing in a Menotti opera, Steggert shied away from musical roles for quite some time. "My voice didn't really settle until I was a junior in college. I had some real troubles as a freshman and sophomore in college because I had voice teachers who didn't understand that my voice needed time to really mature. I was spurred away from musical theater in my early college years because I had no confidence or strength. I concentrated on doing straight theatre and classical plays as a result of my voice not being ready. I would say that it finally became a man's voice only when I was in my mid-twenties." This is odd for someone to understand because Steggert's singing in A MINISTER'S WIFE is not only clarion but it is refreshingly youthful. His solos could stop the show if they were allowed to in this production.
