GYPSY OF THE MONTH: Dominic Roberts of 'Mary Poppins'

Three-year-old Robbie Ankrum already knows how to spell supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. He even can spell it through hand and body gestures while singing along, just as he's seen his Uncle D do in the Broadway production of Mary Poppins and in the Mary Poppins cast's performances on The View, Today and CBS' The Early Show.

Uncle D, known professionally as Dominic Roberts, is making his Broadway debut in Poppins—and he's just as excited about it as his little nephew. "I couldn't pick a better show to be my first Broadway show," says Roberts, 24. "Everybody knows Mary Poppins. It means something to so many people. Even people who have nothing to do with musical theater, they're like, 'Oh, you're a chimney sweep? That's so cool!' It's a very special piece of musical history."

In addition to a stepping-in-time chimney sweep and "Supercal" confectionery customer, Roberts portrays a townsperson, banker and starlighter in various numbers in Mary Poppins. Most noticeably, he's also a Pan statue in "Jolly Holiday," the teddy bear in "Temper, Temper" and part of the three-couple ballet during "Let's Go Fly a Kite." With ensemble members playing so many different roles, "it's become more choreographed off stage than on stage," reveals Roberts, as he describes how he and his castmates basically fall into formation when they have to scoot off stage for a costume change.

Roberts says his favorite number is "Step in Time" because of the acrobatics. The first steps he ever took in front of an audience were acrobatic—he started doing gymnastics as a preschooler and competed in the sport until he was 12. Then he took up baseball and ice hockey, which were his main extracurricular activities right up until his senior year in high school. After playing one of the brothers in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat with a local professional troupe toward the end of his junior year, he decided it was too much juggling two sports with choir and theater, as well as the advanced science courses he was taking.  

"I just didn't know what I wanted to do with myself," recalls Roberts, who grew up in Austintown, Ohio, outside Youngstown. "I was a little too small to be competitive [in hockey] at the college level. I had fun when I was performing…I think it was just for lack of a more ridiculous idea."

So he chose theater over carrying on his family's athletic tradition (his father, a schoolteacher and coach, had set records as a running back at Ohio's Mount Union College), and was promptly rewarded with the lead role of J. Pierrepont Finch in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying at Youngstown Playhouse during his senior year. He also had the lead in his school's production of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, playing eldest brother Adam even though, says the 5-foot-6 Roberts, he was the "youngest-looking and smallest of the brothers."  

But the toughest audition he had to ace was for college. He applied to Baldwin-Wallace College's Conservatory of Music in Cleveland, which accepts only about 12 students a year into its musical theater program. He got in, and began studying dance for the first time. As a former jock, he found that "dance came pretty easily to me because it's just another way of using your body in an athletic way."

Despite his relatively late start in dance, Roberts has landed in several dance-heavy shows, including St. Louis Muny's summer 2005 production of West Side Story, which won Kevin Kline Awards (the local Tonys) for outstanding ensemble and outstanding musical. "The cast was unbelievable," says Roberts, who played Baby John. "All of the Jets were young, and none of us had danced the show before, so we were really excited about it. We learned the show in 10 days and had this amazing energy. We played baseball and Frisbee on all of our breaks, while we're dancing this crazy show in the heat. We just never stopped pushing each other and pushing ourselves. It was like a brotherhood. Noah Racey was our Riff, and he really led us." Three days before opening, however, Racey landed wrong during the "Prologue" and tore his Achilles tendon, one of the gravest injuries for a dancer. Since it was a dress rehearsal, the cast had to keep on dancing—even as Racey was crawling off the stage in pain—and continue running through the show without interruption. (Shane Rhoades ended up playing Riff.) 

Roberts returned to the Muny last July with a featured role of his own, the Artful Dodger in Oliver! In the summer of 2006 he also participated in the reading of High School Musical, the Disney TV phenomenon that's being adapted for the stage. It was his first time working in New York with name actors from Broadway, among them Kate Reinders, Merwin Foard and Kristine Nielsen. It also, Roberts believes, provided the exposure he needed to win a part in the Mary Poppins chorus. Thomas Schumacher, head of Disney's theatrical division, attended the High School Musical reading—and was also present when Roberts was called in afterward to audition for Poppins. He had already been seen for it about five times. Along with Schumacher and the choreographers, producer Cameron Mackintosh, director Richard Eyre and the movie's songwriter Richard Sherman were in the room.  

"They whittled down from 12 people to 3 people to 2 people, and they left the 2 of us sitting out in the hallway," Roberts says. "After about 15 minutes, [casting director] Tara Rubin came out and thanked the other person there and asked me to come in. I still really didn't know if they were casting for vacation swings or this or that. They brought me in and Tom Schumacher called me over: 'Come talk to me!' And everybody's milling around, and I'm half dressed. 'Am I supposed to be in here right now? What's going on?' [Schumacher says:] 'You did a great job today. They really liked you.'" Roberts thought that was going to be followed with a "but…" Instead, Schumacher told him: "You got the job—you start tomorrow at 9:30."  

Later that day, Roberts went over to the Olive Garden in Times Square and quit his waitering job. Ever since, he's taken a lot of ribbing from his new co-workers about his former position. "All throughout rehearsals and previews, even up to a few weeks ago, I was getting pasta jokes, and breadsticks and salad jokes," Roberts says. "I don't think I will soon hear the end of my Olive Garden fame."  

He had to give up another job to join Mary Poppins: a role in Shakespeare's R&J at St. Louis Rep. Roberts had performed at the Rep in 2005 as a Protean in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (a production that originated at the Cincinnati Playhouse) and in 2004 as the Deputy in The Mystery of Edwin Drood. He's also been in shows at Carousel Dinner Theatre in Akron, Ohio; Vermont's Weston Playhouse; and Cain Park, a summer theater in the Cleveland area. At our interview in a downstairs lounge of the New Amsterdam Theatre, Roberts discovered that Elise de Roulet—who played Liesl to his Rolf in Cain Park's Sound of Music a few years ago—works at the concession stand in the lounge.  

Roberts had already been cast as Billy Crocker in Carousel's Anything Goes when he moved to New York City immediately after college graduation in May 2004. "I had a one-way ticket the morning after my graduation ceremony," he says. "I packed my bags, sent everything from my dorm room home with my parents in the van, and headed to the airport."  

Since he knew he'd be going back to Ohio in six weeks for Anything Goes, Roberts just crashed on friends' couches while he got to know the city and went to his first auditions. He got close enough to a role in Wicked (Boq understudy) that he was flying back and forth to New York for callbacks during the run of Anything Goes. He was cut right before the final callback.  

Back in New York, where he now has his own apartment, Roberts' main employer besides Disney (and the Olive Garden) has been off-Broadway's Prospect Theater Company, where he's performed in the musicals The Pursuit of Persephone and Iron Curtain. But it's been a whole new world singing and dancing on Broadway—one that even his athletic past didn't fully prepare him for.  

"It's been challenging for me to learn how to use my body healthfully eight times a week," Roberts says. "I love to just pour out all my energy, and I'd blow it 30 seconds into 'Step in Time' in rehearsals and I could barely make it halfway through the number. I had to learn how to focus my energy, to maintain…to think about my breathing and focus on where the action is, and control my breathing for singing."  

Though he lacks extensive ballet training, he's had no problem working with ballet-turned-theater choreographer Matthew Bourne. "If you have an opinion about the character you're playing and you create a way to move, Matthew Bourne allows you to really experiment with that," he says. "He creates a vocabulary with his movement. It's textured and layered and specific. You have to love to dig into that. We were learning steps and combinations for 'Jolly Holiday' and 'Step in Time' that we never used, just to play around and see what you could come up with. A lot of the statue stuff, a lot of the kite ballet, we came up with on our own."  

While he's currently riding a career high, Roberts knows that he's chosen a profession of hard knocks. To deal with the stress, "I try to keep interests outside of theater," he says. "I still play hockey when I get a chance. I try to pursue other things that I enjoy—photography, watching sports. I love to cook. I have a lot of amazing cooks in my family."  

His specialties as a chef include bracciole, pasta sauce, chicken francese, pepperoni rolls and pasta fazool—many of which he learned from his Italian grandmother, who's still a maestro in the kitchen at age 85. His mother and aunt, meanwhile, are super bakers. Ever since they loaded him up with bins of homemade cookies for the Mary Poppins cast and crew when he went home for a wedding during rehearsals, everyone at the theater, including Thomas Schumacher, have been requesting additional shipments. 

Photos of Dominic, from top: off stage at the New Amsterdam; seated at right, with some other Jets in West Side Story at St. Louis Muny; as Oliver!'s Artful Dodger at the Muny.