When John Y. Brown Jr. became Kentucky’s governor in 1979, among the commitments he inherited from his predecessor, Julian Carroll, was $35 million for a performing arts center in downtown Louisville.
Brown, who died in November 2022 at the age of 88, lowered that number to $23.5 million and required a community commitment of $6 million. In less than 18 months, Louisville media mogul Barry Bingham Sr. and insurance executive Thomas Simons, co-chairs of the fundraising committee for the Kentucky Center for the Performing Arts project, raised the $6 million.
When that milestone was reached, Brown delivered a plot twist worthy of the center’s Whitney Hall stage.
“Now that you’ve raised the $6 million, why don’t you raise $10 million?” Brown said in a 2013 interview that is part of the Kentucky Center’s (now Kentucky Performing Arts’) oral history collection celebrating the center’s 30th anniversary.
“When you look back, I don’t know where Kentucky has invested money that’s been more productive than this arts center,” the former governor said.
When the center officially opened on Nov. 19, 1983, the fundraising committee had raised about $13 million, according to a 1983 story in Louisville Magazine. The total project cost was $33.5 million. The opening-night gala included A-list celebrities Charlton Heston, Diane Sawyer, Lily Tomlin, Jessye Norman and Douglas Fairbanks Jr.
“This was Louisville at its best, our best moments for the arts,” said Allan Cowen, CEO from 1976-2011 of Fund for the Arts, an advocacy and fundraising organization that serves Louisville artists and nonprofit arts organizations. He was also a member of the committee that planned and built the center. “We had people who were absolutely inspirational in their commitment to this journey toward greatness.”
Cowen credits that success to people like Bingham; Simons; Marlow Burt, the center’s first executive director; and Wendell Cherry, then-president of Humana and the Kentucky Center’s first board chair.
Cowen characterized Cherry as “the hero of the story.”
“He would walk the foundation [as the center was under construction] and was intimately connected with every single aspect of the project,” Cowen said.
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If the first 40 years of the Kentucky Center’s history constitutes its first act, the last decade has set it up for a thrilling second act, with all the ups and downs associated with high drama.
The “ups:”
- In 2014, Pollstar ranked two of the Kentucky Center’s venues in the Top 100 Theatre Venues for total ticket sales. Whitney Hall ranked No. 26, and the Brown Theatre ranked No. 100;
- The Kentucky Center Foundation purchased the 1,441-capacity Brown Theatre on Broadway in 2018. The center had managed that historic venue since 1997; and
- The Kentucky Center opened a new 2,000-person standing-room venue, Old Forester’s Paristown Hall, in 2019.
The two significant “downs” over the past 10 years were major events that affected the Kentucky Center as well as the artist community it serves. In June 2018, an accidental fire caused about $9.9 million in damage to the center’s iconic curved copper roof. The center reopened after 11 weeks, and restoration to the roof took 17 months. In March 2020, when the first case of COVID-19 landed in Kentucky and forced the cancellation of mass gatherings, the center was not immune from the deleterious effects of the global pandemic.
Longtime Kentucky Center staff member Kim Baker became the center’s president and CEO in 2014 and oversaw the responses to both events. The fire occurred as the center was actively working on a rebranding to “Kentucky Performing Arts” to reflect its mission of moving beyond the Kentucky Center’s physical bounds.
“Having gotten through those events, there were a lot of lessons that were learned,” Baker said.
Among those was the fact that so many entities have direct relationships with the Kentucky Center. The venue is home to five resident companies—StageOne Family Theatre, the Louisville Orchestra, the Kentucky Opera, PNC Broadway in Louisville and the Louisville Ballet. Closure of the center meant those companies did not have a venue in which to present their programs.
“Their livelihood depends on performance and having spaces to perform,” Baker said. “So, one of the lessons that I really learned was the importance of ‘we’—the grand ‘we’—and also the kindness and the support and generosity of this community.
“People really stepped up to help us during that time, opening their doors so that people that were supposed to be here in this space could have space to perform so that the show would go on.”
The center did its part to make sure that construction associated with repairing the fire damage was scheduled around resident company needs, such as those of the Louisville Orchestra. The orchestra uses the center for its rehearsals.
“[The Kentucky Center staff] went above and beyond,” said Adrienne Hinkebein, the ensemble’s director of orchestra personnel and a staff member with the orchestra since 2000. “I feel like we pulled together at that point. Yes, there are other places for the orchestra to perform, but our audiences are used to the space in the Whitney.”
Andrew Harris said that synergy is what makes the relationship work. Harris has been with StageOne Family Theatre for 23 years and became producing artistic director in 2020. He characterized the relationship between the center and its resident companies as transcending that of landlord-tenant.
One example was StageOne’s 2016 production of Harold and the Purple Crayon, with an original script based on the popular children’s book by Crockett Johnson.
Harris said the company hired an animator to do live, carefully choreographed animations during the performances, and kids in the audience could draw along with the animator.
That involved getting 600 tablet devices, purchased by Jefferson County Public Schools—one for every student in the audience, with each tablet connected to Wi-Fi.
“Six hundred tablets running all at once is a bit of a burden on your internet,” Harris said, “but we worked closely with the center’s IT department on how to build out a system that could support and sustain it.”
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The Kentucky Center is the “home office” of the Kentucky Governor’s School for the Arts, which was formed in 1986 to give high school students a high-quality intensive arts educational experience during the summer. The Governor’s School hosted its first class of students in 1987 on the Bellarmine University campus. As a high school sophomore, Baker was among the first students to attend.
That kind of outreach has been part of the center’s culture since the beginning, Baker said.
“I always believe that the center was here to support the region and certainly Kentucky. And I think that that has always been its mission,” she said. “The growth that I’ve seen is definitely in the diversity of artists and audiences that come here and the type of art forms that are presented here. That’s really changed throughout the years. And I would say that piece of it was always the intent.”
Since 1987, the center has hosted the Kentucky Music Educators Association high school all-state ensemble performances. Students from across the state participate in band, orchestra and choir groups made up of the best high school musicians in Kentucky.
“The decision was easy because what we needed was the stage, a place where we could provide a good experience for the students,” said Melanie Wood, a former president of the KMEA and a member of the association’s board at the time the group decided to use the center’s Whitney Hall for those performances. “The Kentucky Center was literally at the center of everything we needed.”
The KMEA estimates that some 40,000 students have played or sung at the center in those elite ensembles.
Former Fund for the Arts CEO Cowen said that broadening the audience was intentional. He recalled a time when he visited an LG&E coal power plant and talked to the employees about donating to the arts.
“One of the guys came up to me, and he was so excited. He was going to go to see his first musical, and it was Phantom of the Opera,” Cowan recalled. “And I just thought, ‘Isn’t this great?’ This guy gives a couple dollars from his paycheck, and he feels ownership.”
In that respect, Cowen said he believes the Kentucky Center has become a source of civic pride in Louisville and Kentucky.
“The Kentucky Center as an aspirational strategy for Louisville was phenomenal,” Cowen added. “And what one would hope and wish for in the future is to use it to re-energize that same aspiration.”
Kentucky Performing Arts' Venues
Whitney Hall (2,377 seats)
Brown Theatre (1,441 seats; standalone theater not within the Kentucky Center building)
Bomhard Theater (701 seats)
MeX Theater, a black box theater (139 seats)
Old Forester’s Paristown Hall (2,000-person standing capacity; standalone theater not within the Kentucky Center building)
Many of the Louisville Ballet’s productions are at the Brown Theatre, but its annual performance of Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker, a holiday favorite, is one of two that use the massive Whitney Hall and has done so each year since the 1983 opening.
“The Nutcracker is the one that introduces so many people to the ballet. I remember Alun saying that,” said Helen Starr Jones. A native of London, England, Jones and her husband, Alun Jones, moved to Louisville in 1975 when Alun was hired as the ballet company’s artistic director; he served in that capacity for 24 years. “Having the Kentucky Center as a venue has allowed us to do a really splendid production of The Nutcracker because we had the space. It really showcased the Louisville Ballet in an incredibly exciting way.”
For more information and to purchase tickets, visit kentuckyperformingarts.org.
Tom Musgrave is a Lexington-based freelance writer and was one of the 40,000-plus all-state musicians who have performed at the Kentucky Center for the Performing Arts.