MENASHA, Wis. (WFRV) – The future of the UWO Fox Cities campus is becoming a bit clearer at least for the campus’ theater and fieldhouse.
On Tuesday afternoon, Winnebago County officials announced they’ve entered into a one-year agreement with Wisconsin Entertainment Group to manage the campus’ theater and fieldhouse facilities. This will allow musicians, actors, and athletes to once again use these spaces.
“For years, for decades this has served as a hub for the community for cultural arts, for performers, who have enjoyed this stage as their home,” Winnebago County executive Gordon Hintz said.
Fox Valley Concert Band director Jim Morgenstern said the announcement was music to his ears. He said when the campus closed last summer they had rotated between several different facilities for rehearsals and concerts.
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Many of the facilities they utilized were local schools. Morgenstern said they were incredibly grateful that several districts let them use their space. However from a practicality standpoint, it wasn’t always easy to coordinate scheduling with the school’s normal music events and some of the venues couldn’t accomodate all their music equipment.
For all of those reasons, he said he’s thrilled to be able to use the theater on the UWO-Fox Cities campus again.
“We are delighted to be back here,” Morgenstern told Local 5 News. “This is really the best way for us, coming back home to this theater.”
The Fox Valley Concert Band already has a World War 2-themed performance scheduled on May 8 at the UW Fox Cities theater to commemorate Victory in Europe Day. The Wisconsin Entertainment Group said that Attic Theater will begin performing shows there in June. They said that Fox Valley Performance Volleyball has also reached an agreement to use the fieldhouse space on campus.
The first show at the theater is May 4 when J the Animated Illusionist performs.
The director of Fox Valley Performance Volleyball told Local 5 News that gym space for practices and competition is difficult to find, so he jumped at the opportunity when he found out that the fieldhouse on the campus would reopen.
County officials said there were several reasons why the agreement is for just one year.
“Some of it, is you don’t want to do a five year deal when you don’t have the board (Hintz said he didn’t need county board approval to enter into this agreement) and don’t know the economics of it, the reality is the county is going to have some tough choices to make,” Winnebago County executive Gordon Hintz said. “Showing that it can be the kind of facility that we think it can be and demonstrating that success I think would allow us to build off this year.”
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Hintz told Local 5 News that the county would get 20 percent of any revenue generated through renting out the space at the theater and the fieldhouse. He said while the extra revenue is important, the main goal is to once again give the community the chance to continue to enjoy these spaces.
“We’re really excited to bring this back to the community, it’s really something that can set us apart from other areas,” Jason Lipsky with the Wisconsin Entertainment Group said.
Hintz said that the future of the rest of the campus is still up in the air. He said they plan to create a panel to explore the long-term feasibility for potential future uses of the campus. A plan to sell the entire campus to Faith Technologies fell through earlier this year.
UWO-Fox Cities closed as a college campus back in June. Lipsky said they’re working on a name change for the campus to better reflect the current situation.
“We don’t know what the long-term future holds but right now but we’re here to make sure that we reopen it thinking we have a better chance of redeveloping the entire campus with this place (the fieldhouse and theater) open and operational,” Hintz said.
