Vegas Magazine - Niche Media - There is a place beyond the crowds, beyond the ropes, where dreams are realized and success is celebrated. You are invited.
Issue link: http://digital.greengale.com/i/419349
F or Beth Behrs, the best part about shooting her next film at a karaoke bar in Brooklyn was belting out "Summer Nights" with costar Max Greenfield. "I do a great Olivia Newton-John impression," she admits. Behrs is best known for playing the sweet, somewhat clunky, riches-to- rags Caroline Channing on the CBS sitcom 2 Broke Girls, but the actress isn't shy about her pipes. "The Sound of Music is the reason I started acting," she says. At last year's People's Choice Awards, she showed off her vocal and stylistic range, trilling "The hills are alive!" then crooning Miley Cyrus's "Wrecking Ball," then rapping Sir Mix-A-Lot's '90s anthem "Baby Got Back." But it was her twangy two bars of Carrie Underwood's "Before He Cheats" ("I dug my key into the side of his pretty little souped-up four-wheel drive, carved my name into his leather seats...") that offered evidence of where her heart lies. While her broke-girl character doesn't leave the apartment without her Louboutins and pearl choker, Behrs is a cowboy boot – wearing, horseback riding, down-home country music fan. It's country music that has brought her to Vegas several years in a row, for the Country Music Awards. "I've always loved going to Vegas, ever since we went there on a family trip when I was a kid. It's so exciting," she gushes. Exploring the city as an adult has its advantages. After the awards last year, she stumbled upon The Chandelier at Cosmopolitan, then the charcuterie at Jaleo, and somehow ended up at Joël Robuchon at the Mansion at MGM without a reservation—or even the slightest notion about the exquisite meal that awaited. "I didn't know that it was Michelin-rated. My friend and I were just hungry. We had no idea what we were in for with the delicious food—the bread selection was so beautiful and elaborate, it was like nothing I've ever seen, and I'm obsessed with carbs!—and incredible service, but I guess that's how you do Vegas!" Behrs moved around as a kid, from Pennsylvania to Virginia to the Bay Area, and then finally to her current home of Los Angeles, where she attended film school at UCLA. She seems to stumble into greatness wherever she goes. In high school, when the local community theater announced auditions for her favorite musical, she went out for a bit part and got the lead. That would be Maria in The Sound of Music. "The guy playing Von Trapp was 40," she says. "I was 16. My father was freaking out." At 25, she landed the role of Caroline after producers put her through seven rounds of auditions. "It was a crazy process," Behrs says. "They had to make sure I could handle it, since I hadn't ever headlined my own show before." She has more than handled it. Set in hipster-central Brooklyn, 2 Broke Girls is now in its fourth season, and Behrs has won accolades for creating a millennial Shirley to costar Kat Dennings's Laverne. The show's premise is that Caroline has to start over after her father is caught running a Ponzi scheme and all her assets are frozen. She gets a waitressing job in a diner (where she won't run into anyone from her uptown life) and quickly bonds with her scrappy, snarky coworker Max, who saves her from sleeping on the subway (and even boards Caroline's poor horse Chestnut in their tiny backyard).