For Michael Bobbitt, all the world is a stage for children’s theater

Across an enchanted bridge, past a fanciful carousel and inside a small arena at Adventure Theatre in Glen Echo Park waits Michael J. Bobbitt, the show’s artistic director. The stage below him is dark only minutes after a sold-out matinee. Left behind at center stage is a plate of giant strawberry and chocolate cupcakes that, when the stage lights are on, entice the cat starring in the recent production of “If You Give a Cat a Cupcake.”

The next line goes: “If you give a cat a cupcake, he’ll ask for some sprinkles to go with it,” and on and on to bigger adventures. The cat is never quite satisfied.

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A couple of the sprinkles have fallen onstage. With so many shows, the set has taken a beating. But the wear is to be expected. Under Bobbitt’s direction, the number of yearly patrons at this theater has grown from 18,000 in 2007, when Bobbitt took over, to more than 50,000. In his four years at its helm, Bobbitt has sought marquee children’s book titles for his stage, calling in Tony Award-winning directors and actors and breaking Adventure Theatre box office records.

Little people in his audiences cheer wildly in packed matinees. After racking up six nominations in four years, Adventure Theatre won its first Helen Hayes Award last week, for outstanding production for young audiences, for “If You Give a Pig a Pancake.”

On Monday, Bobbitt will be awarded the DAINTY (Distinguished Artists in Their Youth) Award, sponsored by the No Rules Theatre Company, based in Washington and Winston-Salem, N.C.

Adventure Theatre’s adaptation of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” and “If You Give a Pig a Pancake” broke box-office records. Last fall, Bobbitt made a deal with Montgomery College to co-produce the play “The Happy Elf” by Grammy Award winner Harry Connick Jr. The show was directed by Tony winner John Rando and starred Tony winner Michael Rupert. On opening night, Connick showed up.

“Michael has taken a small entity tucked into a corner of the county,” says acclaimed director Nick Olcott, who has directed adult theater at Arena Stage and children’s theater at the Kennedy Center, “and built a theater I think will establish a national reputation. . . . He doesn’t think small and he doesn’t shy away from challenges. . . . He has his eyes set on big things.”

The Kennedy Center’s Kim Peter Kovac says Bobbitt has done a “terrific job” of elevating the work at Adventure Theatre. “It’s been quite remarkable what he has done in moving it to a new level, while maintaining the integrity of the history of that theater,” says Kovac, producing director of Kennedy Center Theater for Young Audiences.

Such a rush of accolades could inflate the ego of another young artist. And yet Bobbitt, 38, will not take a bow. Even here in a quiet theater after the show, when no one else is looking. Like the cat in the play, nothing will satiate him. When someone praises his work, “the brain goes blank,” says Bobbitt, a hunk of a man in a red baseball cap and red suede shoes. “The brain goes to, ‘Don’t believe it.’ I don’t know how to respond. I say, ‘Thank you.’ It must be the gypsy in me from the time I tried to get the next job and the next job. . . . I felt not good enough.”