#UMassGives 2018

The Stephen Driscoll Musical Theater Fund

#UMassGives supports cross-disciplinary collaboration

Among alumnus Stephen Driscoll’s most vivid memories of his time at UMass Amherst are cross-disciplinary collaborations — art students sketching performers as they rehearsed; music and dance students bringing their skills to theatrical works; falling in love with that most collaborative of genres, musical theater.

Small wonder, then, that Driscoll has established the Stephen P. Driscoll Musical Theater Endowment, which will eventually fund “musical theater or incorporation of music and/or dance into theater produced by the Department of Theater.”

Supporting collaboration is the focus of the Department of Theater’s #UMassGives campaign, a 36-hour online donation campaign. We invite all our friends and supporters to join us in growing the Stephen Driscoll Musical Theater Fund, a companion Fund to the eventual Endowment that will allow us to begin these collaborations RIGHT NOW!

What does the Fund do? While of course the projects we undertake include full-on musical theater productions, the fund benefits students in many other ways, whether that’s supporting team-taught cross-disciplinary classes, inviting dancers to choreograph movement in plays, or recruiting musicians to accompany our work. We already have a project in the works that illustrates how we hope to use the fund — Music department members are composing original vocal music for our adaptation of a Spanish Golden Age play coming to our stages in Spring 2019.

We are excited to use this #UMassGives opportunity to raise funds and awareness of our Stephen Driscoll Musical Theater Fund.

During last year’s UMassGives, we had over 76 donors give more than $3000 to theater. We’d love to do even better this year! In fact, we’ve signed on for a challenge — if we can get the most donations from individual donors on April 26 between 2 and 3 p.m., we could win an extra $2000.

Please share on your social media, and if you can give, please mark your calendars to make a donation during #UMassGives!

Thanks so much!