"Gentlemen Prefer Blondes," With Megan Hilty, at City Center Does gold digging qualify as an official Olympic sport this year? Hey, since synchronized swimming, you never know. If it does, there's no question as to who will be bringing home the gold medals this summer. Yes, folks, the legendary Lorelei Lee has re-entered the ring, and she's got her mojo back. Anyone who would stand between her and the crown - er, tiara - should prepare to fall. Ever since she first appeared in Anita Loos's great comic novel "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" in 1925, Miss Lee has been one of the most decorative embodiments of this country's determination to win and be wealthy. Immortally embodied in musical versions of Loos's tale in the vastly different but equally memorable forms of Carol Channing (on Broadway in 1949) and Marilyn Monroe (on film in 1953), Lorelei has since seemed to live on as only an amusing, platinum-tinted specter from another age. But now she has returned in the flesh, and what flesh it is. In the red-blooded Encores! concert staging of "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes," which runs through Sunday at City Center, Megan Hilty achieves the unlikely feat of wrestling Lorelei from the hands of Monroe and Ms. Channing to make the character entirely and originally hers. In the process she reminds us what a quintessentially American creation this grasping, ruthless and oddly innocent Lorelei is - one, I might add, whose tribe can still be spotted at dinner parties on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. I'll admit that I wasn't expecting miracles from either this production, directed by John Rando, or Ms. Hilty. In 1995, The last time this musical, which features a bouncy score by Jule Styne, was revived on Broadway, Vincent Canby wrote in The New York Times that "the show celebrates a kind of mindless musical we have outgrown, with a kind of mindless sexism that's no longer tolerated." As for Ms. Hilty, she has registered as a likable and competent performer in the unfortunate musical adaptation of "9 to 5" (2009) and on the current Broadway-theme television soap opera "Smash," but never as much more than that for me. As it happens, in "Smash" Ms. Hilty is portraying an actress who longs to play Marilyn Monroe in a Broadway bio-musical. No matter what you think of Monroe's performances, with their self-hypnotized eroticism, they left a singular and ineradicable stamp on her characters. The same might be said of Ms. Channing, of whose Lorelei the critic Brooks Atkinson wrote in The Times,"There has never been anything like this before in human society." Yet while paying homage to Ms. Channing's inspired angular cartoonishness and to Monroe's surreally curved sensuality, Ms. Hilty finds a middle ground between those extremes that is far from middling. Robust, ambitious and single-minded, her Lorelei is very much of this world, inhabited by that potent and uncompromising life force that propels its possessors to places like the White House, the Super Bowl and the top tiers of megacorporations in addition to efficiently run, expensively upholstered Park Avenue aeries. Conveying this spirit with a finely graded style that layers filigree comic flourishes over the raw will and stamina of a top-flight athlete, Ms. Hilty sets the tone for a production that locates the athletic, all-American verve in "Gentlemen." Though set in the 1920s, the musical version - which features a book by Loos and Joseph Fields and lyrics by Leo Robin - pulses with (and makes fun of) the virile confidence that flooded post-World War II America. Set mostly on a cruise ship bound from New York to Paris and later in Paris itself (John Lee Beatty and Peter Kaczorowski did the charming, shorthand sets and lighting), "Gentlemen" presents its Americans abroad as energetic, optimistic and undeniable. The ship's passengers include - in addition to Lorelei and her best friend, Dorothy Shaw (a blooming Rachel York) - a United States Olympic team of strapping young men and one Josephus Gage (Stephen R. Buntrock), a Jack LaLanne-ish health guru who also happens to be a zipper manufacturer. His profession is no idle detail. Zippers pose a serious threat to the livelihood of Gus Esmond Jr. (Clarke Thorell), who is Lorelei's fiancé and the son of Esmond the Button King. Buttons and zippers, of course, are what we use to get in and out of clothes, and continuing talk about them fills the air with innuendo. But the competitive business spirit is just as important to the show's tone. For make no mistake: Lorelei is a businesswoman of the first rank. Her pretentious grammar ("a girl like I"), her pseudo-ladylike gestures and her way of blithely leading with her chest may suggest otherwise, but this seeming bimbo is more focused and driven than anyone around her. As Ms. Hilty plays her, she's a cornfed pragmatist (from Little Rock, Ark., you may remember) who'll take advantage of every asset at her disposal to get what she wants.