Megan Hilty Is Bringing New Songs and Personal Stories Back to Café Carlyle

Café Carlyle is getting ready to welcome back Tony and Grammy Award nominee Megan Hilty for a special residency from June 16 to 27, 2026. Best known for her breakout role as Ivy Lynn in the NBC musical drama Smash, Hilty has built a celebrated career spanning Broadway, television, and concert stages around the world. She most recently starred as Madeline Ashton in the hit Broadway musical Death Becomes Her, earning a Tony Award nomination and a Drama League Award nomination.

Hilty first rose to prominence on Broadway as Glinda in Wicked, later originating the role of Doralee Rhodes in 9 to 5: The Musical, which earned her multiple award nominations. Her stage work also includes acclaimed performances in Noises Off, as well as Encores! productions of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Annie Get Your Gun. On screen, Hilty’s television credits include appearances in Annie Live!, The Good Wife, and Desperate Housewives, among many others.

She just checked in with BroadwayWorld to tell us all about the upcoming gig!

Let’s get into the Carlyle of it all! I know that you have been there many times before. How excited are you to be back again? 

I am so excited. I was getting even more excited this week because I actually started making a file of old photos and videos that we’ve taken there. I have realized that we have deep family history at the Carlyle now. I mean, I’ve been pregnant with both of my kids on stage there. Both of my kids have lived there as children while we’ve been performing downstairs! Before every show at the Carlyle, we always run through a song together as the band in our suite and my kids are always there. I have this video of Ronan as a baby and he crawls over and pulls himself up to the coffee table inserts dancing while we’re singing and my daughter’s dancing around and singing with us. And I realized that this place is more than just a venue that I play. This is a place where my family goes and stays for two weeks at a time and really becomes part of the Carlyle family with everybody who works there. 

I feel like it’s literally the swankiest gig in New York City…

Truly, I cannot think of a more iconic New York musical experience. Every day you have no idea what mega-watt celebrity you’re going to brush by in the hallways or at Bemelmans [Bar]. We were just there a couple weeks ago because our friends Jim Caruso and Billy Stritch were playing. We rolled up and there was all this paparazzi there… and it was the night before the Met Gala. So all of Vogue was there, models… Cher was there! The last time, Paul McCartney was there! It just speaks to the type of establishment that that building is. It’s such a staple of Manhattan. 

What’s on your mind in building your set list for this show?

It will very possibly change from night to night. That’s the luxury of getting to do multiple shows. The great thing is that my band is like all my best friends and my husband. We’ve been working together for years and years, so we have a shorthand. I can just start introducing a song that we weren’t planning to do, if I feel like the audience isn’t feeling what we’re doing. If I just give them the eye or just simply start introducing something else, everybody’s just going to go with me.  

There is a structure that we follow for all of our shows. It’s very mathematical. There is a method to our madness. But we will regroup and say, “This didn’t work, maybe we can plug in something else here.” But starting out I always have to at least do half staple songs that I do all the time. If you’re coming to see me, I want to hit at least some of those that you might be expecting. But I do want to keep it varied as well, so we do have several new songs that we’ll be doing there too. 

I know that you just played in London not too long ago in a much bigger room. How does playing a venue of this size affect your planning?

It was 2000 seats in a gorgeous West End house- the Theatre Royal Drury Lane. I felt like Beyonce. It was crazy! Crazy. Our producers, Darren Bell and Sam Quested put together this gorgeous set and lighting package. And we filmed it. I can’t do a lot of that huge stuff in this small room, but some of the things I do, we just do it a little differently. In the close proximity of Cafe Carlyle, you don’t want me screaming at you for an hour. 

I mean, some people might…

I mean, yeah, I’ll scream a little bit. [Laughs] 

I’ve heard you talk about how one of your favorite things about this kind of performance is the intimacy and getting able to share a piece of yourself with the audience. What does that back and forth with the audience mean to you?

 I’ve always felt that the whole reason to do these concerts or to go to one of these concerts is to get to know the artist outside of the characters that they play. The last couple decades, that’s what I’ve been trying to do, is trying to be as honest as possible. That’s why nothing’s scripted. I have bullet points of what I know I’m gonna talk about, but I don’t want anything to feel like it’s too rehearsed. I mean, sometimes I might trip over my words or something, but it’s real. I want it to feel like I’m genuinely working through something in a moment with you witnessing it.

And in this room, I’ve had the luxury of, I always have this one spot. I have this one tender moment about three quarters through the show. I have this one spot where I put my special song. It’s the one that I really want you to listen to. The other songs, we’re having fun, but I save the special one. By that point, I feel like I’m close enough with the audience that I can share a little bit of myself. Every time at the Carlyle, it’s been something different. 

One of my favorites was doing “Ballad of Sad Young Men.” Kurt Elling is one of my favorite vocalists and he does a cover of it. So mine was deeply inspired by his rendition. And the son of the person that wrote it came to the opening night and shared all of this information. It seemed like the appropriate space to be singing it in and it really worked. 

The last time I was there, it was the first time I’d been in a very intimate space after experiencing deep loss and going through a tremendous amount of grief. And without it being too overbearing and oversharing, I wanted to strike a balance of acknowledging it, because it was such a public thing for me and my family… but not trudging through anything. I don’t want to make anybody uncomfortable, but at the same time, as I’ve been going through all of these things, I realized that the best thing to do is to talk about what you’re experiencing because it makes it easier for people in their experiences. 

So I sang, “I’ll Be Seeing You”. It was a song that I didn’t quite understand until I’d experienced that type of loss. So I talked about losing my sister and her family. I was not crying and weeping, but I want to keep talking about her to keep her alive. And this is why this song is important to me. And that’s that’s what I found over the years is that the setup to these songs and letting these audiences know why these songs are important to me, is so crucial. 

I realized that you wrap your residency at the Carlyle and right after that, Death Becomes Her closes! 

Isn’t that bananas? It’s the day after! I’m just kind of shocked. I was always kind of hoping that I’d be back! I’m in mourning a bit with everybody else. I’m shocked and sad, but also deeply grateful for all of the amazing things that came to me through that show. So that’s going to be a moment for me too where we’ve gotta touch on our sadness so that we let it run through us, but ultimately I’m gonna focus on all of the amazing things that that show brought into my life, because there is a lot.  

What are you just most looking forward to in these two weeks ahead of you?