Todd McKenney -- otherwise known as the Boy from Oz -- has big, big plans.  Indeed, you'd have to say this 35-year-old "boy" is altogether unstoppable.
    Next week McKenney will meet three keen producers to pitch his long-held dream; a "one-man splashy mega-show that will blow people's heads off".
    The $500,000 extravaganza -- and yes, he's confident of raising the money -- will be a McKenney showcase, featuring a 30-piece orchestra, street performers, ballroom dancers, illusionists, and back-from-the-dead video duets with his hero and alter-ego, the late Peter Allen.
    After that, McKenney -- who recently won a Mo Award for his role as Allen in the hit musical The Boy from Oz -- plans to do not much.
    Indeed, he jokes that he'll sell macadamia nuts in Byron Bay to chill out before his next step, the biggest challenge yet -- Broadway.
    The Melbourne-based entertainer scored a coup last year when the vigilantly protective US actors' union allowed him a temporary green card to play Allen when The Boy from Oz opens on Broadway next year.
    McKenney, a born entertainer and traditional song and dance man, became the first Australian musical performer to get the US green light after producers Ben Gannon and Robert Fox argued that only an Australian could play Allen in the biographical rags-to-riches tale.
    The two producers of the home-grown and wildly successful musical -- it grossed more than $60 million during a two-year tour of Australia -- are trying to secure a theatre and hope to open on Broadway late next year.
    When he finally stands on that New York stage singing I Still Call Australia Home, McKenney's journey from Perth to Broadway will mirror Allen's odyssey from the small town of Tenterfield, NSW, to Radio City.
    "The idea of taking an Australian show in an American style and selling it back to the Americans is really thrilling to me ... They loved Peter Allen there, and it will be great to go back and do it waving the Australian flag, if you like," the cheeky McKenney says.
    But for now, it's time Todd and Peter had a little break.  They're not getting divorced -- McKenney still loves him and appreciates that he's the source of his glittering success -- but after 766 performances as Allen and endless comparisons made between the two men, something's got to give.
    "I'll always be married to him, in a way," says McKenney.  "That suits me fine ... But I want people to see the real me, to see the man behind the boy."
    Hence the entertainer's recent sold-out month of cabaret at Capers in Hawthorn (he's taking his show to Sydney next week and will be back in Melbourne on 12 September).
    Peter Allen still features in that show, but it was more about Todd McKenney as a well-rounded entertainer, a man who hasn't got a perfect voice, but likes to make people laugh.
    And it was more intimate.  For the first time in two years, McKenney could hear his audience sneeze and cough.  "In cabaret, people are so close to you they can look right up your nose," he says.
    McKenney is having a fine time.  "I'm having an absolute ball at the moment," he says.  And that alone is worth having a song and dance about.