Alumni Spotlight: From Toledo to the Great White Way

Kevin Smith Kirkwood, FCRH ’99, one of the Angels in the Tony Award-winning musical Kinky Boots, credits his high school musical director for putting him on the path to New York City and a group of generous Fordham alumni for helping him become the first in his family to earn a college degree.

Growing up in the projects of Toledo, Ohio, Kirkwood started singing as a hobby, first at home, then in the gospel choir at his community church. He continued singing at St. John’s Jesuit High School, where as a student he coordinated the liturgical group under the guidance of Ron Torina, S.J., who headed ministry services and directed all of the school’s musicals.

Kevin Smith Kirkwood, FCRH '99

In Kirkwood’s freshman year, Father Torina cast Kirkwood in Hello Dolly. “I had never seen a Broadway musical, didn’t know what it was,” he says, but “I was bitten by the bug there.”

He performed in musicals and plays throughout his four years at St. John’s. And he found a mentor in Father Torina. “He was the first person who told me I was really talented and should make a go of it.”

During the fall of Kirkwood’s senior year, Father Torina accompanied a group of St. John’s students, including Kirkwood, on a trip to visit Fordham as part of a special program for admitted students. They toured the Rose Hill campus, stayed overnight in the residence halls, and met with Fordham students, faculty, and resident assistants.

“We were sold. I thought it was the college campus of the movies. I knew that I was home when I saw the city, the energy, all the different kinds of people coming together. I was excited by it and invigorated by it,” he says. “I never looked back.”

With a financial aid package of scholarship, loans, and grants, Kirkwood enrolled in Fordham College at Rose Hill and found his niche on campus when he became a member of the Mimes and Mummers, and helped revive the Fordham Glee Club, which had been inactive for decades. He also made his way to a Broadway show, seeing Rent with its original cast. “[My friends and I] were obsessed with that show,” Kirkwood says. “It was so new and fresh.”

While performing in shows for Mimes and Mummers and the Glee Club, Kirkwood also did work-study with the Fordham Phonathon and worked in the Residential Housing Office. Kirkwood relied on these on-campus jobs and his financial aid to help him pay for college, but in the summer before his junior year, he received his tuition bill indicating that his financial aid package fell short of covering costs for the year. Kirkwood was going to drop out of Fordham until he spoke with Stan Pruszynski, FCRH ’73, president of the Fordham Glee Club Alumni Association. “Stan said ‘we have money saved up for a future scholarship and we decided that you’ll be the first recipient.’”

“I’m so lucky and so grateful,” says Kirkwood, of receiving the Fordham University Glee Club Alumni Memorial Endowed Scholarship in Honor of Father Theodore T. Farley, S.J. “It’s an example of an act of kindness that can make a huge difference.” And with the scholarship, he could stay at Fordham. “I’m the first person on either side of my family to go to college. My family is so proud of me and I share that accomplishment with them.”

Kevin Smith Kirkwood as one of the
the Kinky Boots Angels

He won a part in the 2001 national tour of Godspell, and later, was in the cast of a European tour of Jesus Christ Superstar. He earned a New York Innovative Theatre Award nomination for Outstanding Lead Actor in It’s Karate, Kid! The Musical, and the New York Times called Kirkwood “fabulous” in his role of Bonquisha in the off-Broadway show How to Save the World and Find True Love in 90 Minutes. He made his Broadway debut in 2006, as an understudy in the Tony Award-winning The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. “You work so hard and then you get that call and it’s the best feeling in the world,” he says.

In 2013, Kinky Boots opened on Broadway with Kirkwood starring as one of the Angels, drag performers in the Blue Angel Nightclub. “It has a feel-good message,” Kirkwood says of the show, which is based on a true story of a struggling shoe factory owner who forms an unlikely relationship with a drag queen to save his business. The show, winner of six Tony Awards, including Best Musical, is “kind of a dream job,” he says.

When Kirkwood is not on stage, he volunteers with Broadway Cares, which helps raise funds for AIDS-related causes across the United States. “I have a strong sense of community—my Broadway community, my church community,” he says. “Fordham is all about community.”

He returned to the Rose Hill campus in May for his 15th alumni reunion—taking a night off from Kinky Boots to reconnect with his friends at the Jubilee Gala.

“I think how lucky we were to spend that time there. I’m really proud to be a Fordham alum. The pride of having finished [my degree] at a school with that caliber and reputation, it was a tremendous source of pride,” says Kirkwood, “and still is.”

—Rachel Buttner

Alumni Spotlight: 1984 Graduate Sets the Stage for Jubilee

For the weekend of May 30–June 1, hundreds and hundreds of Fordham alumni, friends, and family will converge on Rose Hill for the annual Jubilee reunion. At the forefront of the Class of 1984’s gathering will be Sally Benner, who is leading the efforts for fundraising and attendance for her 30th reunion.

“If I can be beneficial to Fordham … that’s something that I want to do,” says Benner of volunteering for Jubilee. “I don’t want to sit on the sidelines.”

Alongside her other Class of 1984 volunteers, Sean McCooe and Sue Walsh—with more classmates recently joining to help—Benner has been calling and e-mailing alumni to encourage them to return to the Rose Hill campus for Jubilee weekend: three days packed with dinners, cocktail parties, tours, lectures, class photos, Masses, a picnic, a Yankees game—and the always-popular Jubilee Gala on Saturday night.

She also has been inviting alumni to share their Fordham experience with future Rams by giving back to the University with a gift at the President’s Club level, which will help Fordham make a meaningful difference in the lives of current and future students by providing scholarships, financial aid, and general support.

Sally Benner, FCRH '84

“Working on Jubilee on the production side, I understand how much work goes into it,” says Benner, who has attended previous reunions. “It’s gotten more and more elegant each year.” And more and more popular: Jubilee attendance hit an all-time high in 2013 with nearly 2,000 Fordham alumni and family descending on the campus.

Benner has some familiarity with this kind of behind-the-scenes production work.

As a student at Fordham College at Rose Hill, she was a member of Mimes and Mummers, an extracurricular theater group that stages productions in Collins Auditorium. Benner participated in shows all four years, not only acting and singing, but also working off stage.

“I did makeup, sold tickets, but never built sets. I wasn’t allowed near a hammer!” she says. “It really [was like] Glee. It’s the same group of friendly people, but [with a] heavier course load and minus the parents.”

Benner carried on that experience and love for theater long after graduation. In 2004, she founded the Fordham University Mimes and Mummers Alumni Association, serving as its president for the first three years.

The association’s first large-scale event, its 150th anniversary celebration gala in 2006, drew approximately 150 alumni representing five decades. “No matter our age, it was the same stage, the same curtains—[that] united us across the years,” says Benner. “We knew how to work around the theater; it’s a place we were so fond of.”

Benner, the executive director of the New York Office of Development and Alumni Relations for Northwestern University, also spearheaded a campaign to raise $25,000 to replace the old manual light board system with a digital one in the Mimes’ home in Collins. At the 150th anniversary gala, the Mimes alumni association announced the successful completion of the campaign—which surpassed its goal by 12 percent.

“I knew the goodwill was there, the people would be there. We wanted to leave something behind [for the students],” Benner says. “Whenever we go back for shows, students are working with a good light board, and it’s what they should have.”

Benner first became interested in theater as a student at Nardin Academy, an all-girls Catholic school in Buffalo, New York, where she currently serves as a member of the board of trustees. She says she was a very shy child and “learned that if I learned to inhabit another character and use another person’s words, I couldn’t make a mistake. I had a rich imagination and [the theater] was a place of joy for me.”

Nardin Academy’s theater program collaborated with Canisus High School, the all-boys Jesuit school across the street. “That’s how I fell in love with the Jesuit tradition,” says Benner, and in part why she decided to attend Fordham. “The Bronx Jesuits welcomed me.”

After graduating from Fordham in 1984, Benner continued performing until she “outgrew it,” she says, but then found a way to still “use my imagination,” as a playwright. She earned a master’s degree in dramatic writing from New York University. When her career in higher education took off, “playwriting took the side road, [but] I’m always writing and attending theater. Broadway, off-Broadway, and of course, Mimes every year.”

This year, with another trip to the Rose Hill campus fast approaching, Benner is wistful about her student days. “My heart was on Edwards Parade or the cafeteria in McGinley Center,” she says. “Fordham was a little utopia for four years.”

She’ll soon be returning to the green oasis of Edwards Parade for the Jubilee reunion, where she is eager to reunite with her Fordham friends.

“If you realize that you’re only going to see each other every five years, it becomes momentous,” says Benner. “You can’t help but feel like you’re 18 years old again when you see each other, and the laughter makes me feel even better.”

—Rachel Buttner