The Fox Cities Performing Arts Center is a performing arts center in downtown Appleton, Wisconsin, USA. The Center is the home of the Broadway Across America – Fox Cities series, the Boldt Arts Alive! series, the Thrivent Financial for Lutherans Education Series, and the Fox Valley Symphony. The Center has hosted the Wisconsin premieres of the Broadway blockbusters Disney’s The Lion King, The Producers, Wicked, and Jersey Boys and will host Billy Elliot and Les Misérables in 2011. President George W. Bush delivered a speech at the Center during a campaign stop on March 30, 2004.
In 1999, Aid Association for Lutherans, now Thrivent Financial for Lutherans, contributed $10 million – the largest philanthropic corporate gift in the history of the Fox Cities – towards the building of the Center. The Center’s board of directors and volunteer fundraisers raised $45 million in private contributions from over 2,700 local residents and businesses. The Toronto-based Zeidler Partnership Architects was hired to design the Center and in May 2000, the O.J. Boldt Construction Company began construction on the Center. Artec, Inc. provided acoustical and theatrical consulting for the Center. The Center opened on November 25, 2002, 31 months after breaking ground.
The Center is composed of:
- Thrivent Financial Hall. The theater’s 40-foot (12 m) proscenium separates a 5,000-square-foot (460 m2) stage (Wisconsin’s second largest) from the 2,100-seat theater of which no seat is further than 108 feet (33 m) from the stage. The theater walls are finished in a red Veneciano plastering technique, which complements the red seats and brass accents.
- Kimberly-Clark Theater. The 4,160-square-foot (386 m2) flexible black-box space featuring retractable telescoping seating risers and a portable stage platform. This 450-seat theater is used for receptions, banquets, lectures, and intimate music and theatrical presentations.
- Founders Room. A private room located off the Dress Circle Lobby that accommodates meetings or receptions of up to 75 people.
- Entrance 21. A private lounge located on the Dress Circle level available for pre-performance and intermission small gatherings during events at the Center.
Famous quotes containing the words fox, cities, performing, arts and/or center:
“How much the greatest event it is that ever happened in the world! and how much the best!”
—Charles James Fox (1749–1806)
“What care though rival cities soar
Along the stormy coast,
Penn’s town, New York, Baltimore,
If Boston knew the most!”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“And no one, it seemed, had had the presence of mind
To initiate proceedings or stop the wheel
From the number it was backing away from as it stopped:
It was performing prettily; the puncture stayed unseen....”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“Poetry, and Picture, are Arts of a like nature; and both are busie about imitation. It was excellently said of Plutarch, Poetry was a speaking Picture, and Picture a mute Poesie. For they both invent, faine, and devise many things, and accommodate all they invent to the use, and service of nature. Yet of the two, the Pen is more noble, than the Pencill. For that can speake to the Understanding; the other, but to the Sense.”
—Ben Jonson (1573–1637)
“Louise Bryant: I’m sorry if you don’t believe in mutual independence and free love and respect.
Eugene O’Neill: Don’t give me a lot of parlor socialism that you learned in the village. If you were mine, I wouldn’t share you with anybody or anything. It would be just you and me. You’d be at the center of it all. You know it would feel a lot more like love than being left alone with your work.”
—Warren Beatty (b. 1937)