The play centers on six unemployed and mostly unfit steelworkers who decide they can make money to support their families if they start a strip show that goes one step beyond a popular G-string-clad male revue. The Full Monty is British shorthand similar to the American idiom, “the whole nine yards.’’ 

The Cockney accents that confounded audiences of The Full Monty movie are gone because the road show version is set in Buffalo, N.Y., instead of Sheffield, England.

Scarborough, who says he wanted to be an actor since his father took him to see The Wiz when he was 6 years old, packed and unpacked 81 times during the tour, which began in York, Pa., in October and ended in Myrtle Beach, S.C., in May. He says he’s learned to pack efficiently.

“It’s been exciting. I think people don’t know quite what to make of it at first. They don’t know whether to expect a bawdy strip show or something more like the movie,’’ Scarborough says.

Scarborough says the show was tastefully done, and the audience saw about as much as viewers saw in the film version.

Scarborough had a personal cheering section for several of the December performances in Wilmington, Del., because friends from UD and family from Charlotte, N.C., purchased tickets.

He jokes that he used the shows as reunions. His mom saw the show four times.

Nadine Howatt, the University’s PTTP coordinator, says Scarborough‘s great voice makes him a natural for musical theatre.

Scarborough, whose list of credits is too long to put up in lights, has played Shakespeare and comedy and characters as diverse as the Ghost of Christmas Past in A Christmas Carol and the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz.

He says people have asked him how his classical training at UD helped him create the role of Horace, a cranky 50ish member of the male revue who favors doing the Funky Chicken.

“The answer is that Sandy Robbins [chairperson of the Department of Theatre who heads PTTP] taught me to have attention to detail and specificity, so everything that I learned at the University of Delaware is applicable to all of my work and specifically to The Full Monty,’’ Scarborough says.

—Kathy Canavan