The musical theatre star and TV personality says he’s committed to “supporting a theatre that I genuinely believe in.”

Star of stage and (TV) screen, Todd McKenney, may be one of the nation’s most recognisable and celebrated performers, but the award-winning musical theatre leading man and Dancing with the Stars judge says he owes a debt to Sydney’s Ensemble Theatre. “I didn’t really know how to act,” McKenney confesses as we chat, overlooking the waters of Sydney Harbour where the Ensemble Theatre sits, quietly nestled among the leafy suburbia of Milsons Point.

McKenney is referring to his first pure acting job, in Ensemble Theatre’s Helpmann Award-winning 2007 production of Richard Alfieri’s Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks. The play is a beautifully touching but unforgivingly exposed two-hander about tolerance, acceptance and ballroom dancing, in which McKenney starred opposite Australian musical theatre icon Nancye Hayes. “I didn’t really know how to approach a play and how to find the right characterisation, because in musical theatre I kind of knew what the game was and didn’t have to learn,” he says of playing gay dance instructor Michael. “I think [director and former Artistic Director of Ensemble Theatre]...