Megan Hilty was showered with accolades for her role as Lorelei Lee in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes in the Encores! revival of the musical. She'll be reprising a song or two from that score as part of her performance for 42nd Street Moon, which, like Encores!, restages classic musical comedies in stripped-down versions. Hilty said she will be doing "a kind of condensed version of all my greatest hits" as part of Moon's dinner-and-show fundraising gala at Bimbo's on Feb. 27. (Info on tickets is at www.42ndstmoon.org.) Those greatest hits would include songs from the Broadway musical version of 9 to 5, in which she had the Dolly Parton role; from Wicked, in which she played Glinda on Broadway and on tour; and from Smash, the recent NBC series about the fictional travails of getting a show about Marilyn Monroe to Broadway.
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes famously starred Monroe in the role Carol Channing created on Broadway. In his New York Times review of Blondes, critic Ben Brantley wrote that "Megan Hilty achieves the unlikely feat of wrestling Lorelei from the hands of Monroe and Ms. Channing to make the character entirely and originally hers."
Hilty didn't have much to say about her glowing notices. "I actually don't read them," Hilty said of reviews, blogs, and online forums. "I'm not saying I'm above other people's opinions, but for as many nice things that people say, it takes just one bad one to stick in your head, and it's like, do I really want to give people that kind of power over what I'm doing?"
For Hilty, with only two Broadway musicals to her credit, getting a lead role in Smash was a life- and career-changing experience. "It opened doors that I never even dreamed I'd walk through," she said.
The high-budget series featured elaborate production numbers, original Broadway-caliber songs, a cast of big names, and a complex plot of romance (gay and straight), adultery, backstabbing, larceny, and big servings of bitchery. While it never achieved large ratings in its two seasons, it had an intense following �" especially among many theater folks who often mocked its implausible representation of their world. But Hilty is a real-life example of one of the most pivotal plotlines from Smash .
Hilty practically walked from college graduation to a starring role on Broadway without such time-honored dues payments as temping, waiting on tables, and working for nothing in off-off-off-Broadway productions. For reasons to be explained later on, Hilty was rushed into the final auditions for the Glinda standby role in Wicked, which would soon lead to the full-time job itself.
"I won't tell you the other people who were at the audition, but they were much fancier than myself," she said. "I was shocked that I was even there, and then I walked into the room and the director and all the writers were there. They saw me for like eight minutes, and I got the job."
But this quick trajectory to Broadway had its ramifications. "There were a lot of people who were very upset that this nobody from nowhere got this great job," she said. "I won't go into too much detail because they're still people I work with, and I love them now, but I sure felt it at the time."
In Smash, her casting story was mirrored as Hilty's character and colleagues harass the just-off-the-bus innocent who lands the role that Hilty's Ivy Lynn knows she was born to play: Marilyn Monroe. "That's why when people say, 'Oh, Smash was so far from the truth,' I go, 'Really?'"
Hilty has at least one theory why she was put in the audition express lane. A few weeks before she was to graduate from Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh, she was part of a senior-class showcase in front of New York talent agents, including one from the mighty Bernie Telsey agency. Within days she landed the female lead in a new tour of Little Shop of Horrors, and agents began working out a contract even before graduation.
"Then I got a phone call saying they cast Seymour and it's Anthony Rapp, and they're going to have to let me go because now I was too young," Hilty said. "I don't know if Bernie felt bad for me, but right after that they asked me back to New York to audition for the good witch in Wicked."
But in Smash, Hilty played the villainously ambitious Ivy Lynn, who would do just about anything to wrest the role of Marilyn Monroe from the sweet young thing played by Katharine McPhee. Hilty apparently played the villain very well, as she discovered when she arrived on set for a co-starring role in the Sean Hayes series Sean Saves the World.
"At the end of the first day, two people were like, 'Oh my God, we're so glad that you're actually nice. We thought you were going to be so mean.' Even the director said, 'Yeah, I kind of thought that, too.' And I'm like, really? That was just a character I played."
With a wink in her voice, she concluded, "I guess it's just a testament to my great acting."