EDMONTON (CBC) - Tim Ryan, the founder and program director of the theatre arts program at Edmonton's Grant MacEwan University, died Thursday night after being in hospital for several days.

"It's a very sad day here at MacEwan," said university spokesman David Beharry. "We talked to the students this morning and told them Tim had passed away, and there were a lot of tears and a lot of sadness."

Ryan founded the program in 1979 and faculty and students are now coming to terms with the loss of a man who colleagues say had a huge impact on the Edmonton and Canadian theatre community.

"It's impossible to talk about Grant MacEwan theatre without thinking of Tim Ryan in the same breath," said Edmonton playwright and director Ken Brown, who has been on the faculty since he joined Grant MacEwan as an acting instructor in 1983.

"I think Edmonton is left much the richer from Tim's legacy. He really brought to us a kind of theatre Edmonton was really kind of unaware of."

The program was also responsible for training students who have had an impact in theatres in New York and all across Canada, said Colin McLean, who covered theatre and the arts community in Edmonton for CBC for years.

"There are graduates from Grant MacEwan now who are singing in the West End [of London] and on Broadway, on the tour boats," McLean said. "They're singing in Las Vegas, in road shows, and they all can look back and say, 'It was because of Tim Ryan and Grant MacEwan that I am here.' And there are hundreds of them."

Ryan held a B.A. in Theatre and Music from the University of Dayton, and an M.A. in Drama and Theatre from the University of London.

He had been directing and performing in Ohio when he moved to Edmonton to found the Theatre Arts program at what was then called Grant MacEwan College.

Ryan was an expert in American musical theatre, and he changed the way people in Edmonton viewed that tradition, Brown said.

"There was a time when the musical equated to a kind of low-brow, cheerful entertainment," he said. "If there's one person who single-handedly made Edmonton aware of the great writers of the modern American music theatre people like Sondheim, for example it's Tim Ryan."

Ryan leaves behind his wife, Laurie Fumagalli, a former musical director, and two daughters who are both local actors.