Edmonton musical theatre icon Tim Ryan dies
Matthew Kruk
By Liz Nicholls,
edmontonjournal.com
November 6, 2009 11:30 AM
EDMONTON - Edmonton has lost one of its most influential theatre
artists.
Tim Ryan, founder and head of Grant MacEwan University's high-profile
theatre arts program, died Thursday night. A family member said the
cause of death was heart failure due to complications from the H1N1
virus and pneumonia.
Mr. Ryan moved to Canada more than 25 years ago from Cleveland to take a
job at the then-Grant MacEwan College, and was arguably Edmonton's
leading authority on musical theatre. Due to his guidance and contagious
enthusiasm, hundreds of musical theatre graduates from the college are
gracing stages across the country.
Leave It To Jane, a small Edmonton theatre company devoted to off-centre
musicals, was a Ryan invention too. Mr. Ryan directed, mentored, and
advised up-and-comers and veterans alike.
Theatre runs in the Ryan family. His two daughters, Bridget and Kate,
are local actors, as is his ex-wife Maralyn. His wife Laurie Fumagalli,
now a lawyer, is a former musical director.
Mr. Ryan had suffered from heart illness for several years.
� Copyright (c) The Edmonton Journal
Matthew Kruk
By Liz Nicholls,
Edmonton Journal
November 7, 2009
Edmonton theatre, and by extension the theatre community across the
country, has lost one of its most magnetic and inspirational artists,
teachers, mentors, agents provocateur.
With the death Thursday night of Tim Ryan, felled at 62 by congestive
heart failure complicated by the H1N1 virus, Grant MacEwan University's
influential theatre arts department is now without its leader and
visionary founding father.
Daughter Kate Ryan said her father had a heart condition and had been
ailing since spring. He entered the heart institute at the University of
Alberta Hospital a week ago and was tested for the H1N1 virus, which was
later confirmed.
The Ryans are a fabled Edmonton theatre family in the grand tradition:
Both daughters, Kate and Bridget, are actors, directors and playwrights,
as is his ex-wife Maralyn, and his wife Laurie Fumagalli, a
pianist/musical director and lawyer.
They are mourning the loss of a man who combined the love of art and the
love of family in a way that has resonated in theatres here and across
the continent.
Tim--both "Professor Ryan" and indeed "Mr. Ryan" are jarringly wrong for
his puckish, casual style --emigrated to Canada in 1979, a precocious
young American director from Cleveland armed with a startling resume of
credits in opera and theatre, to start a new program at Grant MacEwan.
The way Tim has told the story, a potential musical in itself, he
arrived after midnight, got put up at the Saxony, and by 9 a.m. the next
day, the then-college had a theatre program that specialized in
musicals, to distinguish it from the University of Alberta drama
department.
With him on this extended, 30-year foreign excursion was his then-wife
Maralyn, with whom Tim had run the prestigious Willoughby School of Fine
Arts in Cleveland, modelled after Alberta's Banff Centre, for seven
years. "That was a legacy, too," she says of Tim's artistic directorship
there.
That first Canadian summer Tim put together not one, but two, big
musicals: Pal Joey and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.
It was a tip-off: Edmonton had acquired the services, the rarefied
knowledge, and the unflagging energy and invention, of a true musical
theatre expert.
Passion to share
The bonus, for 30 years of Grant Mac students, is that Tim was the
rarest kind of expert, one who was "passionate to share everything he
knew," as Farren Timoteo puts it. Director and lyricist of the new
Teatro La Quindicina musical Everybody Goes To Mitzi's and artistic
director of Alberta Opera Theatre, Timoteo says meeting Tim was "a
life-changing experience," a sentiment echoed by other Grant Mac grads.
"My life would not be the same if I hadn't met him," says Timoteo. "The
word is 'inspiring.' He was a man of massive passion, devotion and
excitement, as well as an accomplished landmark director."
That was his endearing charm. Not only did he know his stuff, in a way
that never ceased to dazzle, he was an enthusiast, an appreciator.
Talent made him hopeful, happy. Tim would call me up: "Liz, you've gotta
see this kid! He's amazing! This kid cracks me up!" Musical theatre made
him joyful. "There was no bigger fan," says Timoteo, one of the kids who
cracked Tim up. "No show was ever just a job with him. He was in love
with it, and that showed in his direction ...What I learned was that the
best things would happen when you played. He'd be so full of giddy
excitement."
The same thought occurs to Chris Wynters. The presiding muse of the
folk/roots band Captain Tractor is a Grant Mac musical theatre grad who
has gone on to write musicals of his own, including Red Lips with Tim,
and a musical version of The Winter's Tale with Tim's daughter, Bridget.
"The first thing is the energy of the man, to inspire. I'm just one of
many people who feel like that," says Wynters, currently recording a CD.
"Not a day goes by, in any of the things I do, that I haven't heard his
voice in my head.
"I'm so lucky I got to work with him. Such a depth of knowledge. And so
fun."
Juilliard tickets
Kate Ryan talks about the way her father "never stopped believing in
us," the family actors. "If I took a role, he'd always say, 'I know you
can do it!'" The gift Tim gave to many people, she says, was "never to
be afraid ... When I decided in high school I wanted to go to New York,
to Juilliard, he bought the ticket ... His life was the arts and he
never separated that from family."
And as for audiences, Tim gave us musicals we'd never heard of, musicals
we couldn't have hoped to see anywhere else, hip new ones, vintage ones,
musicals that had flopped on Broadway because they'd been overproduced.
In the summer, the academic off-season, he took his student casts to
Fringe stages. In his non-existent spare time, he founded Leave It To
Jane, a company that specialized in pocket, off-Broadway musicals and
straight plays. He did his research where it counts, in person in the
theatre. As Maralyn Ryan points out, in the year Tim spent doing an MA
at the University of London-- his thesis? the application of Oriental
dance and movement to theatre-- he saw 300 shows.
"This is a man who affected so many people," says Maralyn Ryan. "He was
a storyteller, both in person and on the stage."
His own story, after months of declining health and six days in
hospital, ended far too abruptly.
lnicholls@thejournal. canwest. co