So Far, So Good, So Soprano

For the past 18 months, the Orange County musical theater scene has had the rare chance to see a star in the making, a blue-eyed ingenue whose ravishing lyric soprano matches the pellucid beauty of her looks.

Her name is Mardi Robins, and she has almost single-handedly brightened the lives of local musical theater fans. If there is justice from heaven, we will one day see that name in lights on Broadway. In the meantime, Fullerton Civic Light Opera can’t get enough of her.

For her second appearance with the company, Robins will co-star as Sister Sarah, the seemingly unattainable Salvation Army doll, in the Frank Loesser musical “Guys and Dolls,” opening Friday at Plummer Auditorium.

The first time she appeared on stage at Plummer last year, as the Scottish lass Fiona in Fullerton’s beguiling revival of “Brigadoon,” it was clear that Robins had an exquisite vocal gift and that her relative lack of theatrical experience didn’t for a moment prevent her luminous stage presence from shining through.

Artistic director Jan Duncan, who directed her in “Brigadoon,” maintains: “She’s one of those rare people who is as pretty inside as she is outside. And that carries over to the audience.”

For her part, the Australian-born singer-actress displays such genuine modesty about her talents that--perish the thought--her lack of assertiveness may be the only thing to keep her from making it to the top.

“I don’t need to be famous, or whatever, to feel good,” Robins said over lunch recently, with no trace of an Aussie accent or, more important, the proverbial fire-in-the-belly that seems to be a requirement for stardom.

You’d think she might have inherited a certain competitiveness from her father, Noel, a professional sailor renowned in international yachting circles. He skippered the challenger Australia in 1977 against Ted Turner’s Courageous in a losing battle for the America’s Cup.

“I get competitive I guess,” Robins admitted. “I know the closer I get to winning a role the more I want to win and the harder I work. But I don’t think I’m terribly bold. I won’t push my way in a door. I wish I had my dad’s focus. It would really help.”

Robins patted her lips with her napkin, ever so daintily.

“I like Sarah because I get to do things I haven’t done before. The role is a new experience. Letting loose in the Cuban scene [when Sky Masterson takes her dancing and drinking in Havana] is going to challenge me. I also have to play drunk on stage, which I’ve never done either. All my characters so far have been very nice, very sweet and under control.”

For her last professional outing in July at the McKinney Theatre in Mission Viejo, Robins was cast to type, playing an ideal Marian the Librarian in “The Music Man,” Meredith Willson’s valentine to small-town America. Before that, she played Lily in “The Secret Garden” at the Laguna Playhouse. And when “Guys and Dolls” ends its Plummer run in mid-November, she will jump immediately into playing Mary in “The Glory of Christmas” at the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove.

That will take her to January, when she’s hoping to hear from the producers of “The Phantom of the Opera” about her callback for Christine as a replacement in the Toronto production.

“Actually, I auditioned in L.A. for ‘Ragtime,’ a new show that’s starting up in Toronto and going to Broadway,” said Robins, who lives in Anaheim Hills with her husband, a music director for a nearby church. “Out of that I got the callback for Christine. They want to see me in January, which is when they’re going to have replacements.”

In fact, the first time she auditioned for “Phantom”--in 1993 for the major German production in Hamburg--she was asked to be Christine’s understudy. But she turned down the offer.

She was about to get married to her American boyfriend from California, she said, and had to make a choice.

“Understudying Christine would have been a great credit. They might have trusted me in the role and brought me back here or somewhere else as Christine. But you make the choice, and you can’t worry about it.”

Robins, 27, first came to California in 1986 after graduating from high school and winning a Rotary Exchange Student Scholarship in Perth, the sea town on Australia’s western coast, where she grew up. Her host family in Claremont decided that because she had already finished high school, one semester at Claremont High was sufficient, after which she might as well go to college.

“They asked me what college I wanted to go to for fun,” Robins recalled. “I’d heard that Azusa Pacific University [in Azusa] had a great choir and orchestra, so I went there for a semester as a music major. I was having so much fun I called my parents and asked them if I could come back” for another semester.

Until she got to Azusa, Robins had little theatrical experience, though she’d always been interested in singing and had accompanied herself on guitar as a coffeehouse folkie.

“We didn’t have much theater in Perth. I went to a Catholic girls’ school--really academic, lots of homework, very little entertainment. And anyway it was hard to get guys for a show.”

At Azusa, she took to the classical stage--singing solo roles in oratorios such as Haydn’s “The Creation,” Vivaldi’s “Gloria” and Mendelssohn’s “Hymn of Praise”--and by the time she graduated in 1990 had given recitals in the works of Purcell and Mozart, Schubert and Debussy.

“I can belt too,” Robins added, eager not to be typecast.

Her voice coach, Edward Sayegh, who teaches many Broadway stars including Terrence Mann and Sarah Jessica Parker, said Robins’ voice “is way up there” for quality. When it comes to trying for the big time, he said Robins should “just go for it and not think about it.”

She knows she’s been flirting around its edges. She has starred in a national Disney tour as Snow White at the Hollywood Bowl and the Metropolitan Opera in New York; she has also played a lead in a German musical production of “Dracula” to positive reviews in Munich, and she has done Zora in Gilbert & Sullivan’s “Ruddigore” in Australia.

“It’s always very intimidating to go into an audition and see 400 people in there with you,” Robins said. “But I think I’m up there. Once the cutting starts, it thins out pretty much--and I always get a second look. But I don’t always get a callback because of my inexperience. It would help if I had one great credit on my resume. Then they can trust you.”

She recently had a callback for the role of Magnolia in the Los Angeles production of “Showboat,” which opens in November at the Shubert Theatre.

“I could sing the role, but I didn’t get it because I think they thought I might have been a little young,” Robins said. “You get a little upset when that happens, but you can never know exactly why you didn’t get a role in this kind of business. I want more training for auditions. A veteran will walk into an audition and just be there. I need to work on things longer. I want to go in just ready to go.”

Perhaps her biggest tryout, however, will come in “Guys and Dolls” when her mother flies from Australia to catch her performance.

“She’s never seen me in a show before,” Robins said. “I did send her a video of ‘Brigadoon,’ but it’s not the same. She just wishes she could see more of what I do--and so do I.”

* What: Fullerton Civic Light Opera’s “Guys and Dolls.”

* When: Opens Friday and runs through Nov. 3. Performances 8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays, also at 7 p.m. Oct. 27.

* Where: Plummer Auditorium, 201 E. Chapman Ave., Fullerton.

* Whereabouts: Exit the Riverside (91) Freeway at Harbor Boulevard and head north to Chapman, then turn right. Or take the Orange (57) Freeway to Chapman/Fullerton exit and head west.

* Wherewithal: $14-$30.

* Where to call: (714) 879-1732.