Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: Everett Collection, Getty Images, Duolingo
It should come as no surprise that Megan Hilty’s 11-year-old daughter, Viola, takes musical theater pretty darn seriously.
“She got really upset yesterday because she was on the bus home from day camp and her Discman ran out of batteries as she was in the middle of listening to West Side Story,” says Hilty, a Broadway veteran who has starred in shows like Wicked, 9 to 5, and the recent adaptation of Death Becomes Her.
Hilty began to map her way to the theater when she started voice lessons at age 12 after expressing an interest in performing opera, so Viola’s current path — enrolled in a performing arts school, with a focus on singing — seems genetically predestined.
That doesn’t mean both of the Smash star’s kids are bound for the stage. Hilty says her 9-year-old son, Ronan, has shown almost no interest in following her into the theater. Instead, he’s more interested in Hilty’s voice-over work for animation, where she’s been working pretty steadily since first popping up on Phineas & Ferb in 2010. (Her most recent gig is doing the voice of Lasso Lucy on the new Mickey Mouse Clubhouse+ special, “Mickey’s Country Farm.”)
“Both of my kids have been asking me and my husband if they can start auditioning for voice-over gigs because they’re really interested in how cartoons are made, so that’s been a big conversation lately,” Hilty says. “When I was a kid, I was like, ‘I don’t want to actually be a Disney princess. I just want to sing those songs and say those words,’ because it felt so far away. But with our kids, they can say, ‘If Mom can do it, I can do it,’ so they know it’s actually within reach.”
Photo: Disney+/Everett Collection
I wish my kids got along better sometimes, but one thing they can agree on is watching Bluey. We started watching it back when it first came on, and I think what struck me and my husband was how heartwarming it was and how it was really written for whole families to enjoy together instead of geared toward one specific part of the family. Maybe that’s why it’s so successful.
In terms of favorite episodes, anything with the grannies is really great. There’s an episode called “Takeaway,” and when we watch that, my husband is always like, “I feel so seen right now.”
Anything on Disney Junior. I’m not gonna call it my babysitter, because that makes it feel weird, but I do feel like if I walk out of the room, they’re in great hands with that programming. They’re not only going to enjoy it, but they’re going to learn something too.
I think that’s why my husband and I are so averse to all things YouTube for the kids, because there are some shows on there that actually have a beginning, middle, and end plus a vetted story line, but those are few and far between. So we kind of have a “no YouTube, thank you very much” rule, but if you’re on Disney Junior, then you’re going to have an easier time with us being okay with you sitting and watching for a while.
Photo: Fox/Everett Collection
We also watch Bob’s Burgers together as a family, which is questionable at times. It’s more adult, but the kids love it and so do we. It leads to a lot of discussions but, also, my husband has this encyclopedic knowledge of all things pop culture, so he has a knack for being “No, not this episode.” I don’t remember things like that, so luckily he’s here to guide us in the right direction.
I don’t know how we got into watching it together. It’s one of my favorite shows, though, so when the kids were scrolling through and asked, “Is this something we can watch?” we said, “I think so,” and they were really tickled by that.
Photo: Getty Images
My daughter does this thing where she puts together PowerPoint presentations if she really wants something. That’s how we got our family cat, so you know she’s very persuasive.
A couple of weeks ago, she came up with another presentation in which she was asking for a Discman, the portable CD player from my youth, and I was like, “What? What are you talking about? How do you know about this? Why do you need one?” But I started doing some research and it seems like that’s what the kids are doing now. They’re all listening to their music on CDs and cassette tapes as kind of a “take your power back” thing. Like “I’m owning my music again. I want something tangible and I’m gonna listen to it from beginning to end.” That kind of thing, like very old school. Everything ’90s is new again.
So we got her these CD and cassette players, and then my son wanted one, too, so that’s what they’ve been listening to things on. It’s been wild to see my daughter walk around the apartment with this Discman and plugged-in earphones like I did when I was her age.
A lot of the young performers are starting to cater to the interest in physical media, too, because artists make more money selling tangible things. We’ve gone to all of the artists’ websites, like Sabrina Carpenter, Olivia Rodrigo, Billie Eilish, Ariana Grande … they all have CDs and cassettes for sale, and we’ve been trying to support the artists by ordering from them directly.
It’s become fun hunting for CDs and tapes, too. We go to used bookshops in New York, and that’s where she found an old Barbra Streisand album and an Annie Lennox album. Then Ronan was like, “I want DVDs,” and so we said okay and bought The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings.
The first time my kids were old enough to be aware of live television was in a hotel room — forced to watch live television, they were like, Wait, what’s happening? Why can’t we be in control of this? But they also kind of loved it, and then they fell in love with sitcoms. It was kind of wild to watch. They were forced to deal with what I dealt with when I was a kid, which is that you get what you get. You sit down and watch it or you don’t.
We play a lot of board games. We’re big into Clue. We have a couple different versions of it. We have Bob’s Burgers Trivial Pursuit, too.
The kids love to play chess, which is wild to me. My son loves Dungeons and Dragons.
Have you played What Do You Meme? It’s hilarious, and the things that the kids come up with are so funny. They give you pictures of famous memes, which you display, and then everybody picks what the caption would be for it, so it’s like “Who can caption this meme the best?” It’s really fun.
We’re big Taco Cat Goat Cheese Pizza people, too, but I think my kids like it more than I do. There’s a lot of slapping on the table involved, and I have very long, very fake nails and always feel like I’m going to hurt somebody. I’m very tentative in that game, so I lose a lot, but the kids have so much fun. They’re just thrilled by making the different movements for the different animals and trying to slap the table the quickest.
We read a lot during the pandemic. We read a lot of the Harry Potter books. We did all of The Magic Treehouse together, which Ronan probably doesn’t remember but Viola does.
Right now, my daughter and I are reading the newest Hunger Games book together, which has been really fun. It’s also adult, but they’re reading it in school, so it leads to interesting conversations.
My son loves all things Diary of a Wimpy Kid. He just thinks it’s hilarious, and that’s how he goes to sleep. He listens to those books on tape. My husband leaves his phone playing those at a distance in Ronan’s room as he’s falling asleep, and then later he’ll go and collect it back.
Photo: Duolingo
My daughter has a phone, but it’s one that has enough major training wheels that it’s become boring enough that she never wants to use it.
It’s through a program called Pinwheel. There’s a dashboard that I can use to control everything on it, and it’s really great. All of the apps that you put on it have ratings; for example, red doesn’t follow their guidelines so they don’t recommend it for kids. That’s usually for reasons like you can use it to contact other people or your kids can be contacted by strangers through the app. Yellow is moderately okay, and then green is totally vetted and approved.
She does things like Duolingo on it, so she can actually learn stuff, but there’s no social media on the phone and there’s no internet. She can get on the internet on the laptop that she uses for homework and stuff, but she’s not on it all that much either.
Duolingo is great because you can pair it up with your friends. It’s not that you’re competing with them or anything, but you’re encouraging each other to keep going because it’s “your friend went to this level; maybe you should meet them at that level and then you can talk to each other in French.”
The other thing about Pinwheel is that she can’t call anybody who I don’t program into her phone, and nobody can call her if I haven’t programmed them in, either. So it’s a very curated group of people that she’s able to call and text, and she knows that I can see everything. So there’s lots of training wheels on this phone.
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