Dennis Sankovich

At the MSU Riley Center, we consider ourselves stewards of a Meridian civic treasure. As both an elegant Victorian showplace of a theater and a state-of-the-art conference facility, the Riley Center continues to boost the renaissance of our city’s historic downtown.

We make it our mission to improve the quality of life for everyone in our region. We present a broad range of entertainment for every taste, provide a top-flight location for meetings and conferences, and educate both students and their teachers.

Most people know us through attending performances in our lovingly restored 19th-century theater. In 2017, our audiences enjoyed country music (Brothers Osborne, Scotty McCreery, the incomparable Willie Nelson), jazz (Wynton Marsalis), soul (a Motown tribute), blues (Quinn Sullivan), bluegrass (The HillBenders), classic rock (Judy Collins, Stephen Stills, Blood Sweat & Tears featuring Bo Bice), passionate singer-songwriters (JJ Grey, Luther Dickinson, Beth Nielsen Chapman), legendary vocal groups (Take 6, The Manhattan Transfer) and more.

Families have laughed together at the Cat in the Hat, visited Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood and thrilled as master puppeteers brought dinosaurs to life. Theater fans delighted in a wildly inventive staging of Agatha Christie’s “Murder on the Nile.”

We also rent our facility for a wide variety of social events and have been touted as one of the best venues in the Southeast. We look forward to increasing both event and conference bookings in partnership with our local hotels, including our soon-to-be-neighbor, the Courtyard by Marriott/Threefoot. We also anticipate working with another exciting addition to downtown Meridian, The MAX (the Mississippi Arts + Entertainment Experience).

From a business standpoint, we set ambitious goals for the performance and the conference sides of our business. And we met them. We sold out more than half of our shows during the past season. Our mailing database increased by more than 3,000 names. We upgraded our box office software to make it easy for patrons to renew subscriptions, buy tickets and even resell their tickets, all online.

Even though we anchor the downtown Riley Campus of Mississippi State University-Meridian, many people don’t realize that education is part of our mission. Each season, visiting artists perform special shows during the day just for area schoolchildren. That happens with most of our Family Shows, such as the upcoming “Three Little Pigs” on April 27. We also put on school shows for such stage classics as “Hamlet,” presented by Aquila Theatre in February, and for dance performances, as with this month’s visit by Urban Bush Women.

The MSU Riley Center partners with the Kennedy Center’s Partners in Education program to train teachers in using the arts as a teaching tool for any subject, even math and science.

In 2018, while always looking to improve, we mostly want to keep doing all the things that have woven us so tightly into the fabric of our city. As we say in show business, you don’t monkey with a hit.

Dennis S. Sankovich is executive director of the MSU-Riley Center.