Megan Hill

**New York Times Best of 2019**

Laugh Riots

Comic performances tend to be underrepresented come awards time, but we aficionados are not deterred — and 2019 gave us plenty to savor.

Megan Hill was superlative in three plays this year, but her most balls-out turn was as a preening frontman based on David Lee Roth in Amy Staats’s gender-bending, behind-the-music comedy, “Eddie and Dave.” A vision in snakeskin pants and poodle hair, Hill expertly deconstructed archetypes of strutting rock ‘n’ roll dudedom while also relishing them. I wish I could have seen her performance 10 more times.

-Elisabeth Vincentelli

***

“Besides its intrinsic worth, OPEN should bring more attention to a pair of downtown’s most bracing talents… The similarly versatile Ms. Hill gave a pair of sterling performances in Off Broadway productions last year: as a hilariously prancing David Lee Roth in “Eddie and Dave” and as a woman desperate to escape the menacing attentions of her male colleagues in “Do You Feel Anger?”…Her interpretation of the slightly nerdy, hesitant but determined Kristen is not as showy but just as confident. 

-Elisabeth Vincentelli, New York Times

“The depth of Hill’s commitment keeps reawakening the pathos…”

-Helen Shaw, Time Out New York

“This play is music… and the voice of the singer is the kind that lifts you to another realm.”

-Front Row Center

“Hill’s performance as Kristen is funny, honest, compelling and heartbreaking; one cannot take their eyes off her, and it’s not because she is the sole occupant of the stage.”

-Theater Scene

“Megan Hill gives the most phenomenal performance I will see this year.”

-HiLoBrow

***

“Eva (a wonderful Megan Hill), provides more expected responses… Ms. Hill — who recently appeared as the turbo-charged rocker David Lee Roth in Amy Staats’s “Eddie and Dave” (directed by Ms. Bordelon) — here delivers a very different comic portrait. Always trembling with an air of apology and confusing the names of the men in her life, from her father to that serial killer, Eva at first seems like the funniest character. She turns out to be the saddest as well.”

-Ben Brantley, New York Times

“Hill is excellent in the role — high-strung, scary-funny, and eventually, in the play’s awful climax, full of real, harrowing pathos.”

- Sara Holdren, New York Magazine

“Megan Hill displays pinpoint comedic timing and poignant vulnerability as Eva.”

- Elisabeth Vincentelli, The New Yorker

“Megan Hill turns in a high-voltage performance as Eva.”

- Deb Miller, DC Metro Arts

***

“And, most impressively, Megan Hill nails the restless envy underlying David Lee Roth’s manic, hammy charisma.”

- Rollo Romig, The New Yorker

“Hill eerily channels the aggressive, grating charisma of David Lee Roth.”

- Zachary Stewart, Theatremania

“Hill, who is marvelous, sells these lines like a born huckster, while also injecting just a tinge of the desperation that will emerge later.”

- Elysa Gardner, New York Stage Review

***

“Ms. Hill delivers a posturing aria of hip-hop speak that almost brings down the house…”

- The New York Times

“And best-in-show honors go to Megan Hill, who is pricelessly funny as the hard-driving journalist Rosemary Crawley. With a quasi-British accent that occasionally warps into a sort of Southern drawl, Ms. Hill’s determined Rosemary mixes the square-shouldered toughness of Rosalind Russell and the heightened dramatics of Ms. Dunaway in the movie. She tiptoes gently up to the line that divides ripe comic acting from mugging and stays firmly on the right side.”

- Charles Isherwood, The New York Times

“…Hill shows an appealing strength…”

-The Huffington Post

 “Megan Hill… demonstrates a dazzling comic sensibility…”

-  Backstage

“…Ms. Hill is triumphant. Go see her.”

- Blogcritics

“…the chameleonic Megan Hill is sharp as a knife and funny as a fart…”

- The Stranger, Seattle