Baton Rouge Bucket List: Catching a show at the River Center

This is the fifth article about one of the 26 items on the Baton Rouge Bucket List. The Advocate’s features staff will complete the 26 items throughout 2023 and write and report first-person experiences and/or previews of the experiences every other week throughout the year. We encourage readers to play along and let us know about your happenings related to the Baton Rouge Bucket List.

Looming over River Road in downtown Baton Rouge, the River Center has been Baton Rouge’s largest events venue since 1977, hosting everything from ice hockey games to Mardi Gras balls during its 46-year history.

Sponsored by Raising Cane’s since 2016, the complex has several components: the 10,000-seat arena, a smaller performing arts theater and a grand ballroom/exhibition hall.

Being the largest of the venue’s rooms, it’s no surprise that the arena has the widest variety of shows throughout the year, along with high school graduations. It’s where big-name musical acts come to play — everyone from Snoop Dogg to Bob Seger has been through — as well as monster trucks and sporting fixtures. Last week, it hosted a huge university-level gymnastics meet on the same day as the BRAC annual luncheon.

In February, it hosted the Spanish Town Ball — the cavernous venue turning into a sea of pink as decked-out ball-goers partied till the wee small hours. I was there and can attest that having the lights turned on after an evening of partying and finding yourself in the middle of an arena, is a uniquely jarring experience. 

Every December it hosts the delightful, family-friendly Ice Skating on the River event, which proves you can indeed have a Hallmark movie-style ice skating moment in the South. On that (icy) note, it was also once the home stadium for the much-lamented Baton Rouge Kingfish ice hockey team. 

The smaller Theater for Performing Arts is just around the corner from City Hall and the downtown library. It’s a classy building, having reopened last year after an extensive, multimillion-dollar upgrade that saw a range of improvements (including expanding the lobby and guest services area, and improving its seats and aisles).

It’s home to local luminaries like the Baton Rouge Ballet, Baton Rouge Symphony and the annual Broadway show series. To be fair, it’s also had its share of rock ‘n’ roll shows. Last year’s appearance by REO Speedwagon was — I kid you not — a great one. Lead singer Kevin Cronin related a charming story about peering out of a window before the band’s show at the venue (then known as the Riverside Centroplex) in early 1981 and being staggered to see a long line stretching from the venue’s door all the way down the road.

It subsequently turned out that local DJs had cottoned on to what would become the band’s breakout album, Hi Infidelity, before anyone else, and was the first sign of the massive heights they would go on to scale. These days, Cronin said he has just two pieces of memorabilia on the wall of his home songwriting room: one is a ticket from that show. 

Something to be aware of when visiting the venue is its clear bag policy, which is enforced with a strictness that would make TSA agents blush. If you’ve accidentally brought along a handbag, be prepared to either trek back to your car and drop it off or (and I’m not saying this is a good idea, by any stretch) live dangerously and hide it in a bush. This has been known to happen.

Originally, the focus of this story was going to be about seeing the great bluesman Buddy Guy at the theater earlier this month, though a ticket mix-up at his show — in combination, it must be said, with some spectacularly rude and unhelpful staff — put an end to that.

I hate to be a downer, but a quick flick through online reviews will attest to a certain strain of unpleasantness with some of the theater’s staff. At last year’s REO Speedwagon show, I personally witnessed an usher locking a young lady, who was having a cigarette break, out of the theater on the dubious grounds that a one-way entry policy was in effect. She managed to talk her way back in, only to be subjected to a lecture about the unseemliness of a lady smoking. In this day and age?

But leaving some grumpy staff aside, there are few better places to catch a show in Baton Rouge. A look at the calendar speaks to the almost bewildering variety of shows on the near horizon — “Jesus Christ Superstar,” “The Price is Right Live,” Kevin Gates, Ashley McBryde and the Harlem Globetrotters will all be coming through River Center in the coming months.

Something for everyone, indeed.