Reflections Magazine Issue #81 - Fall 2014 | Page 26
Column
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from the alumni office
Curtain Up! Light the Lights!
Great Theater at (and Beyond) the Heights
Jennifer A. Hamlin Church H’13
Associate VP for Advancement &
Director of Alumni Relations
(517) 264-7143
[email protected]
Photo by Lad Strayer—Adrian Daily Telegram
26 | Reflections Fall ’14
If you’ve been to Siena recently, you know the arts are alive and well. At this year’s Homecoming,
you heard lots of music (marching band at halftime, Acapelicans at Alumni Awards, choir at Mass)
and saw lots of art (John Wittersheim and Lois DeMots retrospectives in Studio Angelico, alumni art
in McLaughlin, six alumni sculptures in the new Wittersheim Memorial Sculpture Park). And there’s
a good chance you were humming “Day by Day” from the Theater Siena production of Godspell
directed by theater program chair Doug Miller ’74. All of the arts are vital to the life and legacy of
Siena Heights—enough so that Joni Warner ’83 now works officially connecting our campus with
the Lenawee community through the arts.
Today, I’d like to spotlight Siena’s theater program.
For the past decade, one of our most popular alumni events (outside of Homecoming) has been
the annual spring Dinner & Theater gathering. About 100 people come to campus—from as far as
Detroit, Lansing, Battle Creek and many parts of Ohio—for dinner and the final production of the
Theater Siena season. Some people come every year and it’s not uncommon to hear things like
“Wow, I saw this once in Boston/New York/Toledo—but this was better!”
That sentiment was definitely buzzing around the Croswell Opera House in Adrian this past
summer, when Siena’s Mark DiPietro ’83 directed a full-scale production of Les Miserables with a cast
and crew almost half made up of Siena Heights alumni, students and faculty. “We had 300+ people
audition,” said DiPietro, chair of SHU’s Fine and Performing Arts division. “They came out of the
woodwork for the chance to be in the full, adult version of the show.”
Even at the Croswell, “it was tremendously difficult to mount such a massive show,” DiPietr