copyright 2009, The Washington Post NEW YORK -- For Noah Robbins, the shift in the universe happened in a Washington subway station. He and his mom were on their way to Georgetown Day School for a rehearsal of 'The Producers,' in which he was playing a lead role. His mother found out via cellphone that Noah was going to Broadway. About a month shy of graduating from high school, the slight, talented kid from Potomac, Md., was being offered the lead in a Broadway play. Just like that, Robbins left the cozy support network of school theatricals for the cutthroat hubbub of the commercial stage. The part itself -- that of Eugene Jerome, teen-age narrator of 'Brighton Beach Memoirs' -- was storied, featured in the first major revival of Neil Simon's autobiographical family comedy since its 1983 debut. That production, which ran for years, happened to do quite a bit of good for the actor who originated the part, Matthew Broderick. 'At that moment, it felt like, 'How did this happen?' ' says Robbins, who just turned 19 but could pass for 15 -- the age of the character he plays. He's sitting in the living room of the Upper West Side apartment his parents, Larry and Leslie, have rented for what they hope will be an extended run of Noah's excellent Broadway adventure. It's still hard for Robbins to take in the magnitude of this opportunity. He's a star-struck young man receiving his baptism in the theater world's biggest pond. One day during rehearsals in a Times Square building filled with Broadway shows-in-progress, he got into an elevator and found himself face to face with one of his idols, Nathan Lane, who is starring in a musical version of 'The Addams Family' later this season. It was a little too much for Robbins, whose knees all but buckled. 'I get in the elevator, I'm sweating,' he recalls. 'And I press the wrong floor because I'm so nervous.' Onstage, however, an ability to project a wise-beyond-his-years sense of authority helped him beat out hundreds of other would-be Eugenes whom the producers and director David Cromer considered during an arduous, months-long search. 'There's so much pressure about casting that kid -- it's the first part of any conversation about the play. It's like casting Stanley Kowalski,' says Cromer, a Chicago director who is making his own Broadway debut, having been recruited on the strength of the critical and popular success of an off-Broadway revival of 'Our Town.' 