Married Duo Megan McGinnis and Adam Halpin on Sexy Role-Playing, Getting Together for Obama and Falling in Love Nightly at Daddy Long Legs

Two years into their marriage, Broadway vets Megan McGinnis and Adam Halpin are getting an injection of romance every night in the form of the new off-Broadway musical Daddy Long Legs. They’ve been together since Obama got into office and McGinnis has been working on the show almost as long, taking the slow-burning love story of spunky Jerusha Abbott and the pen pal with the titular nickname, to more than a dozen regional theaters around America and even to London’s West End before landing in New York at the charming Davenport Theatre. Now, in a turn neither of them saw coming, Halpin has gone from supportive hubby in the audience to onstage match. Broadway.com checked in with the sweet pair during rehearsals to find out how they’re taking their love to the stage.

Q: It’s crazy that you’re doing this show together now. Was this the plan all along, Megan?

MEGAN: No! I’ve been doing the show for six years now. Adam has seen it, how many times?

ADAM: Fifty to sixty times. That’s not an exaggeration.

Q: Watching her different leading men, did you ever think, “I could play that role!”?

ADAM: It never once crossed my mind.

MEGAN: I think he always thought of it as my show. I’ve been involved with it for so long, but then the opportunity arose. They were having auditions and someone mentioned they thought Adam should come in. I told him and he said, “No, I shouldn’t!” Then they didn’t find anyone and it come up again and it became more of a question of what would it do to us, as a couple. It’s such an intimate piece and I am an only child, so sharing is very hard! [Laughs.]

ADAM: Ultimately we have to put our marriage first. I think we harped on that for quite a bit with each other.

MEGAN: We do have some rules now.

ADAM: Yeah, we have rules.

Q: What kind of rules?

MEGAN: [Director] John Caird has suggested some rules. The first rule was don’t go to work together and don’t leave together.

Q: Like literally don’t walk together?

ADAM: Don’t leave our apartment, go to the train and take the train to work together.

MEGAN: So we each have our own separate times. Not leaving work after the show at the same time might be a little strange. Do we both walk to the subway and then I say, “Oh, I’ll walk to the last car and you walk to the first car and I’ll see you at home?”

Q: So Megan, is it going to be weird to call your husband Daddy? Or maybe kind of sexy?

MEGAN: [Laughs.] Someone just said that to me last week, and I actually hadn’t thought about it.

ADAM: I think it’s kinda hot. Why not? Role play is healthy for a marriage.

Q: Pretending like you’re two strangers on a train who don’t know each other could be hot, too.

MEGAN: Yeah! “Who are you? Where are you headed?”

ADAM: I’m into it.

Q: Seriously, this is a really beautiful, romantic show. You get to fall in love each night.

MEGAN: Yeah, every night. And he gets to propose to me every night. John did say that he thought the journey would actually be good for us every night, for our marriage.

Q: How did you two meet?

ADAM: When I was still in college, I came up to see…

MEGAN: You just aged me. Why’d you do that?

ADAM: I didn’t say when it was! She did a benefit concert reading of this Pete Mills musical called Illyria, which is Twelfth Night set to music. I came to see this benefit reading at the Lucille Lortel.

MEGAN: This was March 2004.

ADAM: She was doing Belle in Beauty and the Beast at the time. The second she opened her mouth, I was completely transfixed, so my friend Matt and I talked to her at the after party. We had a five to ten-minute conversation.

MEGAN: That I have absolutely no recollection of.

Q: She was Belle in Beauty and the Beast! She didn’t have to talk to just any random guy.

ADAM: She was a big old star! I was still a student.

MEGAN: See? Aged me.

ADAM: She never left my mind after that, really. Cut to four years later. I was doing Glory Days on Broadway. She came to see it with her then boyfriend.

MEGAN: My boyfriend knew him, so we said hi afterwards. Then over the summer, the boyfriend and I broke up and then in October 2008, Adam and I both auditioned for Fiddler on the Roof.

ADAM: It was an all-day callback affair so we were chatting a lot. I knew exactly what I was doing.

Q: You were working it. Forget about the role, you were trying to get a wife.

ADAM: Yep.

MEGAN: Neither of us got the job but he then sent me a Facebook message. We started Facebooking back and forth and we still have all the messages. I had posted something on Facebook about volunteering for the Obama campaign in Pennsylvania. So Adam wrote “Hey, I want to do that! Let’s drive down together.”

ADAM: See that move? You like that?

MEGAN: And I was like, “I don’t know this dude, I’m not going to get in a car with him alone. So I called my friend Nikki Renee Daniels and we all drove down. We went to a Biden rally that night in Philly.

ADAM: This was like two days before the election.

MEGAN: And you asked me out officially on our first date on the night Obama won.

Q: So dramatic. Someone should write a musical where they sing your Facebook messages to each other. It would be like the love letters in Daddy Long Legs.

ADAM: Well, believe it or not…

Q: Shut up!

MEGAN: At our wedding, Telly Leung and Kate Reinders read the conversation at the reception.

ADAM: And the audience… I mean our FRIENDS, loved it. It was pretty hilarious.

MEGAN: They also had a lot of commentary.

Q: Megan, how are you feeling to start this new chapter in your history with the show? Excited? Excited and scared?

MEGAN: Excited and scared, that’s about right. I know the show so well but I’m trying to sort of just lay off a little bit because Adam deserves his own time to explore it and find it as opposed to me just saying “So this is how it goes.” The best part of all is I respect Adam so much. I know what a great actor he is, I know what a great singer he is. So I feel like I’m in good hands and in a two-person show, that’s essential. So for that aspect, I’m definitely excited. As for how it’s going to affect our marriage, I’ll let you know in a couple months! [Laughs.]