Broadway Producer Daryl Roth Honored with Dartmouth's Centennial Circle Award

Dartmouth College bestowed the prestigious Centennial Circle Award to Tony Award-winning Broadway producer Daryl Roth at a luncheon in New York last week on April 21.

The award is given each year to a person whose "pioneering efforts and professional achievements have had a significant impact on the advancement of women and the pursuit of a better world."

Roth, the president of Daryl Roth Productions, has won 10 Tony Awards and London's Olivier Award, and has produced seven Pulitzer Prize-winning plays. Over a career spanning decades, she has produced more than 100 shows on and off Broadway. Roth's current Broadway productions include Kinky Boots and Indecent. Groundhog Day and Hello, Dolly! are among her shows that just opened on Broadway.

Roth is a member of the New York City Police Foundation Board of Trustees, the Mayor's Theater Subdistrict Council, an honorary trustee of Lincoln Center Theatre, and she was twice included in Crain's list of the 100 Most Influential Women in Business. The Daryl Roth Theatre, which she founded in 1996, is a landmark building in Manhattan's Union Square.

Roth's husband is New York City real estate developer and philanthropist Steven Roth '62, Tuck '63, a former Dartmouth trustee. The Roth family was the principal donor to the Roth Center for Jewish Life at Dartmouth and has endowed two distinguished professorships and an academic fellowship. Daryl and Steven Roth's daughter, Amanda Roth Salzhauer '93, is a member of the Centennial Circle.

"I am thrilled to receive the Centennial Circle Award," said Roth. "Dartmouth has been part of our family for more than 50 years-we care deeply about the place, the people, the students. Thank you-It's a wonderful honor to be recognized by a group of strong, committed alumnae from a school that is close to my heart."

The award was issued by the Centennial Circle of Dartmouth Alumnae, which has raised more than $20 million since 2014 in need-based scholarships for undergraduate women at the College.

Last year's Centennial Circle Award recipient was Heidi Williams '03, an economist at MIT and a 2015 MacArthur "genius" award winner for her research on patents and innovation in health care markets. Leymah Roberta Gbowee, a Liberian peace and women's rights activist and recipient of the 2011 Nobel Peace prize, won the Centennial Circle Award in 2015. Gbowee, whose son attends Dartmouth, was awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters and delivered the College's 2016 commencement address.

This year's award, a copper bowl, evokes a much-loved ritual-the bonfire run. At Homecoming each year, after a massive bonfire is lighted on the Green, many first-year students run around the fire at least a hundred times-maybe more, if they add digits from their class years.

"The copper bowl incorporates those pathways, those circles," says the Donald Claflin Jewelry Studio's artist-in-residence, Case Hathaway-Zepeda '09. "This is the third year I have built a bowl like this for the Centennial Circle Award. It always goes to someone who is incredibly influential and deserving, and I'm blown away to think that something I made will be in their possession."

Photo Credit: Walter McBride