By Matt Pannell · Buy Local Bowling Green
I’ve spent the last sixteen years watching Bowling Green do a thing it doesn’t get credit for, which is to put on plays. A lot of plays. More plays, per capita, than towns three times our size with twice our money.
This is not a small claim. Let me back it up.
In a single twelve-month stretch starting next month, you can see Puffs at the Public Theatre of Kentucky on Morris Alley, where the seats are close enough to the stage that you can hear the actors breathe. You can see Disney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame at SKyPAC — the dark Schwartz-and-Menken stage version, not the cartoon — performed by the Ramsey Theatre Company with a full Orchestra Kentucky pit. You can watch Xclaim’s youth performers stage Treasure Island, The Jungle Book, and a parody of Stranger Things called, I am not making this up, Thingers Strange. You can see BG OnStage do Charlotte’s Web in the fall and Seussical, KIDS in the spring. You can see PTK do Ayckbourn’s How the Other Half Loves in September and The Best Christmas Pageant Ever in December.
You can also walk into Van Meter Hall on the Hill any number of nights in the school year and watch WKU Theatre & Dance put on something — they do four mainstage productions a year plus two dance concerts plus a Theatre for Young Audiences series, fifteen to twenty productions in total, and tickets are sixteen dollars. Five for students. That is less than a movie.
You can drive past Bowling Green High, Greenwood, South Warren, Warren Central, Warren East, the Christian schools, the junior highs — every one of them mounts a fall play and a spring musical, every one of them has a theater teacher who is doing the work of three people, and every one of them is putting kids onstage who in five or ten years will be the people running the show downtown. My own daughter got into the Kentucky Governor’s School for the Arts in Musical Theatre on the strength of training she got at exactly these venues, from exactly these teachers, in exactly this town. I am not neutral about any of this.
And drive ninety minutes north and you can sit on the lawn at the J. Dan Talbott Amphitheater in Bardstown, where they have been performing The Stephen Foster Story every summer since 1959 — sixty-seven years, longer than most marriages, longer than most countries’ constitutions. Drive seventy-five minutes north and you can watch Kentucky Shakespeare in Old Louisville’s Central Park, free, every night Wednesday through Sunday all summer. Free. The longest-running free Shakespeare festival in America, and it is an hour up I-65.
Six community companies. Fourteen confirmed shows. A full WKU mainstage season. Eight or nine school theater programs across Bowling Green and Warren County. Five summer camps that turn the Xclaim! Center and SKyPAC into something resembling a year-round conservatory for kids whose parents in any other town would be paying private-school theater tuition.
Here is the problem. Until today, if you wanted to know what was playing in Bowling Green this weekend, you had to check four websites, two Facebook pages, a Squarespace donation portal, and the Instagram account of whichever drama teacher remembered to post. You had to know that Ramsey is at SKyPAC but is its own company. You had to know that BG OnStage is the youth program at SKyPAC but is not Ramsey. You had to know who Christopher Cherry is, and that Xclaim! exists, and that PTK is two blocks from downtown in a building most people drive past without noticing.
So we built the page that should have existed this whole time.
It is called Local Theater and it is on the top navigation of BuyLocalBG.com starting today. It lists every confirmed community-theater show in Bowling Green and the day-trip distance through June 2027. It lists every summer camp by company and age. Each show gets two or three sentences telling you what it actually is and whether you’d like it. The companies are all linked. The page will be updated every time a new show or season gets announced — WKU’s full 2026-27 season as soon as it goes public, the high school fall plays as the directors send them, the junior high musicals as those go on calendar, the holiday productions, the spring shows, all of it.
If you teach drama at one of our schools and your show isn’t on there yet, send me your dates: BuyLocalBG@gmail.com. We’ll add you within twenty-four hours.
If you direct, produce, or run a stage anywhere from Smiths Grove to Scottsville to Morgantown and we missed you, same email, same turnaround.
Use the page. Send it to your sister-in-law. Forward it to the friend who keeps saying there’s nothing to do here.
There is plenty to do here. We’ve been doing it for years.