In 2005 Erin Dilly was nominated for the Tony Award for best leading actress in a musical, for playing Truly Scrumptious in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Her fellow nominees that year were Victoria Clark, Christina Applegate, Sherie Rene Scott and Sutton Foster. Her Broadway credits run from Follies, The Boys from Syracuse and Cinderella in Into the Woods to Nice Work If You Can Get It and the Mother in A Christmas Story.
Before all of it, she was a Dramatic Interpretation competitor from Groves High School, and a very good one.
A Groves family
Dilly reached the final round of Dramatic Interpretation at the MIFA State Finals in 1989, finishing fourth in the state, and again in 1990, finishing third. There was one field for all of Michigan in those years, so that put her among the six best in the state, twice.
She was not the only Dilly on the Groves team. Our records show the name all through those years: a Dilly in the Duo final in 1987, a Dilly on the Duo that won the state championship in 1988, and a Heather Dilly in the Dramatic Interpretation final in 1992 and again in 1993. Erin has a sister named Heather, who became an actor and a teacher of young performers herself.
Dilly has said that she started out singing in church, did a few plays in high school and won a scholarship to Interlochen’s arts camp.
The would-be doctor
She was born in Royal Oak in 1972 and grew up in Southfield. When she enrolled at the University of Michigan, the plan was medical school. She has joked that she still diagnoses her relatives. Instead she graduated from Michigan’s musical theatre program in 1994. Her Ann Arbor memories run to chipatis, football Saturdays and walks across the Diag. Michigan now counts her among its Tony-nominated alumni.
She auditioned for the Pittsburgh Civic Light Opera as a senior and earned her Equity card there. Then, as she has told it, she went to New York with tap shoes and blind ambition.
On the road, then on Broadway
The first years were spent touring. She played Belle in Beauty and the Beast for about a year, and Bertrande in Martin Guerre, a production that brought her home to Detroit’s Fisher Theatre in December 1999. The man playing opposite her, Stephen Buntrock, is now her husband. She came back to the Fisher again in 2002 as Nellie Forbush in South Pacific, and stayed at her parents’ house in Southfield for the run, with her family in the audience on opening night.
Broadway came next: Follies in 2001, then Cinderella in Into the Woods and a lead in The Boys from Syracuse in 2002, then the Tony nomination. She was also nominated for the Outer Critics Circle Award for Chitty, and for a Helen Hayes Award for Martin Guerre. The songwriters of A Christmas Story, Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, are Michigan graduates too.
On screen she has appeared in Julie & Julia, Too Big to Fail, Boardwalk Empire, all three Law & Order series and The Night Agent. Onstage she has played the Baker’s Wife in Into the Woods at the Muny and Mrs. White in the premiere of Clue.
Teaching
These days she spends much of her time on the other side of the audition table. She teaches musical theatre at the Manhattan School of Music and at Pace University, founded the Living Studio, co-founded the training programs 12 Miles to Broadway and 5 Days of Broadway, and has co-directed Kristin Chenoweth’s Broadway Boot Camp. She has taught master classes back home at Michigan, at Interlochen and at Marygrove College.
Groves, as it happens, produced two Tony nominees in those years. The other, Jennifer Laura Thompson, graduated three years ahead of Dilly and competed in Dramatic Interpretation at State too. In 2012 the two were in the same Broadway show: Thompson in the original cast of Nice Work If You Can Get It, and Dilly stepping into its lead for two weeks that July while Kelli O’Hara was away.
A Dramatic Interpretation competitor learns to find a character in eight minutes of script and make a room believe her. Dilly learned it in Beverly Hills, used it on Broadway for two decades, and now teaches it to the students who will follow her there.
On record
Our results archive is still being built and has gaps, so this is simply what we hold today.
