By Sarah Buchert

The life of an actor is not all apple pie.

Acting at the professional level is hard because it is, first and foremost, a job. The director is your boss and he does not care if you are having fun – only how good you are. “The idea is to have fun or what’s the point?” says Mr. Sanderson. “It’s not like anyone acts in the theater to get rich.” Doing a show like Mary Poppins, which is so well crafted and has such a great cast and design team, with a role with as much of an arc as Mr. Banks, is very fulfilling both artistically and emotionally.

Mr. Sanderson was born in New York City and was raised in the suburbs. He grew up going to Broadway shows and doing school plays. “The ‘theater bug’ bit very early,” said Mr. Sanderson. “I knew I wanted to be a professional actor by the time I was 16.” After being well received by other people, including his parents, in a musical called She Loves Me during high school, he was encouraged to start what had already been a dream his whole life – the dream of making a life out of acting.

When he started applying to colleges, he was to become a theater major. He worked consistently as an actor in Chicago for several years. Because theatre does not pay a lot, like most stage actors, he had a “day job.” His longest-running day job was teaching adults with developmental disabilities. He did that for two years and spent another year working at an alternative special education school for kids. When he became engaged, he decided to get a full-time teaching job.

Although he enjoyed teaching special education, he decided to teach what he loves the most, theatre. He decided to get a Masters of Fine Arts in acting so that he would be better qualified to teach it. At the same time, his fiancé (now wife) and he decided to move closer to his parents, who moved from New York to Prescott, Arizona. He went to a few interviews in Phoenix where he eventually ended up a TPA, his first full-time theater-teaching job.

“It is really hard to be an actor and teach at the same time. When I am doing a show on top of my teaching job, I never have a day off. Sometimes I get hardly any time off all day,” said Mr. Sanderson. He often has to go straight from TPA to whatever theatre he is working at, usually getting home at round 11 or 11:30 p.m. “But I get paid to do theatre all day, so how can I complain?”

Theater is very time-consuming, but worth it. “If you love it, the work doesn’t really feel like work,” explains Mr. Sanderson. Memorizing a leading role in a play can take weeks or even months, depending on the size of the role. For a professional production, you can expect a limit of anywhere from six weeks to as little as ten days to put it together. “You have to do a significant amount of work on your own. For our school plays, though, you can mostly learn everything in rehearsal,” explained Mr. Sanderson.

You can catch Mr. Sanderson in his next play, Mary Poppins, at the Phoenix Theatre, as he takes on the role of Mr. Banks. The play will run from Nov. 21 until Dec. 28.