Unusual Suspect

People often stop him in the street and ask with a slightly bewildered look of recognition, “Haven’t I seen you in something?”

Of course they have. “It’s the television exposure,” Tony Roberts maintains with the absolute certainty of the damned, not the Woody Allen movies or the Broadway shows.

“Nobody in Disneyland saw Woody Allen, believe me,” he says. “They know ‘The Love Boat’ or the soap operas or my first picture, ‘The Million Dollar Duck,’ which was a big hit. More people saw those than all of Woody Allen and Broadway combined.”

Taller than you might expect and a little grayer, Roberts, who turned 58 last week, is sipping an iced mocha and picking at his breakfast of fruit salad at an outdoor cafe.

He is sporting a goatee for his South Coast Repertory debut as a famous cardiac surgeon obsessed with jazz and “Moby Dick” in the West Coast premiere of Stuart Flack’s “Sidney Bechet Killed a Man,” which opens tonight on the Second Stage.

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A friend once suggested a comeback to the question “Haven’t I seen you in something?” Roberts says he’s always tempted to use it but hesitates “because I’d have to get out of the way real quick.”

Not that he minds the glances or the stares of fumbling recognition or, what may be more embarrassing, outright declarations of fan loyalty.

“I mean, how lucky can you be,” he asks, “to have somebody tell you you’re wonderful?”

Nor does Roberts slight his roles as Allen’s perennial sidekick in those classic screen comedies--”Play It Again, Sam,” “Stardust Memories,” “Annie Hall,” “Hannah and Her Sisters,” “A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy” and “Radio Days”--though even his manager used to remind him that whenever he did an Allen picture his career came to a halt.

“I was always so vividly the guy Woody wrote,” Roberts explains, “that everybody in the business, casting agents, for instance, would think of me that way. The persona I was for Woody”--a companionable dose of sanity in a neurotic world of urban angst --”is a hard thing to break out of.”

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So it’s easy to see the appeal of playing an intense heart surgeon with a Capt. Ahab complex. The role might help Roberts break into something different from the romantic comedies and the Broadway musicals--most recently “Victor/Victoria”--that have been his bread and butter.

“I was looking for something to sink my teeth into,” says Roberts, who lost in back-to-back seasons to fellow Tony Award nominees Robert Goulet (in 1968) and Al Pacino (in 1969).

How much the performing arts world has changed since the ‘60s may be measured by many things, not least by the fact that a Broadway-cum-Hollywood actor can seriously consider breaking into regional theater.

“The purpose of this exercise is to subordinate myself to the demands of this play,” Roberts says. “I think it’s a gripper. I can’t emphasize that aspect of it enough. It’s about a man who goes over the edge. It’s got an unconventional dramatic structure, but it’s a great bit of storytelling. But whether it’s ultimately worth seeing or not won’t depend on my performance.”

What will it depend on?

“Whether the play has impact,” he says. “If it doesn’t work, it will be the play’s fault--not mine. And if it does work, it will also be the play’s doing.”

Roberts, who lives on Manhattan’s Upper East Side a few blocks from where he was born, got his start on Broadway almost from the moment he left Northwestern University in 1961 with a degree in speech and theater. He credits producer David Merrick with believing in him early on and giving him the boost he needed a few years before he turned 30, enabling him to work with some of Broadway’s legends.

Roberts did four shows for Merrick, beginning with the musical “How Now Dow Jones” (for his first Tony nomination) under George Abbott’s direction, and continuing with Allen’s first comedy, “Don’t Drink the Water” (for his second Tony nomination), “Sugar,” a musical based on the movie “Some Like It Hot” (directed and choreographed by Gower Champion) and Neil Simon’s comedy “Promises, Promises,” which Roberts also did on tour in London and at the Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles.

Roberts didn’t get to know Allen well until he was cast in “Play It Again, Sam,” Allen’s second Broadway play. “We hardly spoke,” the actor recalls.

“He was very shy, and I was intimidated by his brilliance. But he was in ‘Play It Again, Sam’ as an actor, and at that point he would come into my room every night and pace around in such a state of anxiety about having to go out in front of people and act that it neutralized things for us, and we became friends.”

They are not as close as they used to be. The last time Allen used him in a picture was in “Radio Days” (1987). Still, they still play an occasional game of chess or stroll in their Manhattan neighborhood.

“Interestingly enough,” Roberts recounts, “in all the years we hung out, we never discussed my being in any of his pictures. I never allowed myself to ask, ‘Have you got something for me?’ I never felt it was my right.

“It was always a phone call from out of the blue. He’d say, ‘I think I have something in this picture. I wrote it for you. Come up and we’ll read it.’ And it was a done deal.”

Why haven’t they worked together recently?

“At some point I think I probably outlived my usefulness in his lexicon or repertoire of characters,” Roberts says. “I’m someone who served a purpose for many pictures and plays that he wrote a long time ago. That’s my persona for him. That’s who I am.”

Roberts keeps his hand in the movies. He finished making “Dead Broke,” written and directed by Edward Vilga, whom he calls “the next Tarantino but not as violent.” The movie is “very weird and funny, and I get to play a sex deviant, to my great delight.”

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Meanwhile, Roberts is always on the lookout for voice-overs, his most lucrative work.

“I did Bud Lite commercials for about five years,” he says. “I don’t think it took me more than two hours a year to go into the studio and record the tag lines about 30 times. That was $125,000 a year. I defy you to find anything in the world that equals that.”

Before Bud Light, he was the voice of Pizza Hut. Jason Robards Jr. took that job from him. “You don’t feel like an idiot losing out to Robards, but it’s definitely a loss. He’s making $200,000 on that job. Patrick Stewart took GTE from me. I had that one for four years.”

Voice-over work, he says, enables him “to experiment” at SCR. The pay for “Sidney Bechet Killed a Man,” which premiered in Chicago earlier this year (without Roberts), “is basically irrelevant,” he says.

“The money I’m getting for this job has already gone to that mall across the street,” he adds, referring to South Coast Plaza, where shopping expeditions have kept him busy between rehearsals.

“I don’t know what resonance the play will have beyond this theater. But right now, before knowing that, it seems to me worth coming here and doing it. It’s a chance to practice my craft.”

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* “Sidney Bechet Killed a Man” opens tonight on the Second Stage at South Coast Repertory, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. 8 p.m. Regular schedule: 8 p.m. Tuesday-Friday, 2:30 and 8 p.m. Saturday and 2:30 and 7:30 p.m. Sunday. $26-$41. Ends Nov. 30. (714) 708-5555.