It’s hard to believe it’s May already! This season, The Lincoln Center presented more LC LIVE performances—productions curated by The Lincoln Center/City of Fort Collins—than ever before. After ending our LC LIVE season with the incomparable Patti LuPone, it’s time to catch our breath, reflect on all our successes, and celebrate what we’ve done together as a community during our 2024–2025 season.
By the numbers
In 2024, approximately 229,000 community members attended a performance, special event, or gallery exhibition at The Lincoln Center, the most in a decade. The Lincoln Center Art Gallery welcomed 16,500 visitors and hosted seven exhibitions that featured work from 133 local and national juried artists. Throughout the year, approximately 1,120 events and performances were held at The Lincoln Center, the most ever produced in a single year.
That includes all kinds of events like weddings, meetings, corporate parties and other special conference rental events, as well as City-presented LC LIVE performances and numerous shows hosted by guest presenters. Guest presenters rent our venue and range from local arts groups like the Fort Collins Symphony and OpenStage to national entertainment organizations like Live Nation. Here’s another fun fact: our backstage crew spent 15,266 hours setting up lights and sound, prepping the stage, and running the shows. All told, 128,447 tickets were sold to a diverse array of performances, showcasing the diversity and creativity of the arts and culture scene here in our community.
Showstoppers Show Up and Show Out
It was another banner year for Showstoppers performances with the national tours of Hadestown, Dear Evan Hansen, Mean Girls and Ain’t Too Proud all taking the stage. This year, we added an additional fifth performance of Hadestown and Mean Girls to meet the increasing demand for quality Broadway tours in Northern Colorado. If you thought this year’s choices were amazing, we can’t wait to tell you what’s in store for next season.
Accessibility Improvements
Captioning Services
As part of our ongoing efforts to make theater accessible to everyone, The Lincoln Center piloted a new program this season that introduced subtitles at specific performances. If you attended some of our National Geographic speaker events, select Showstopper performances, or Sweet Honey in the Rock, you may have experienced our captioning services in action. We offered real-time captioning on screens located throughout the Performance Hall theater and captioning was also available on personal mobile devices by scanning a QR code. We’re pleased to report that, after testing the technology and listening to feedback, we will continue to offer these services next season thanks to Arts and Culture Department funding.
Accessible Parking
Your survey feedback is invaluable as it helps us make changes that better serve you and our community. For those with mobility issues, survey feedback consistently reflected that The Lincoln Center didn’t offer enough parking spots close to the entry doors. Although we have always had more accessible parking than is required by law, we doubled the number of accessible spots in our south parking lot to minimize barriers some of our patrons were experiencing.
Hearing Loop
We have upgraded our hearing loop receivers. Hearing loops allow people who wear hearing aids to directly receive the sound from our sound system in their hearing aids. For patrons who wear hearing aids without wireless receivers called a T-coil or Telecoil built-in, The Lincoln Center provides free separate listening devices. With feedback from key patrons using these listening devices, we were able to troubleshoot areas where the hearing loop did not function as optimally as it should. These efforts have improved our hearing loop functionality and have bolstered our ongoing efforts to make our performances more accessible.
Volunteers
In 2024, over 220 volunteers generously donated a total of 11,573 hours of their time to The Lincoln Center, serving in roles like greeters, ushers, ticket-takers, guides and art gallery attendants. The amount of time our volunteers collectively donate is invaluable and helps us to manage costs so that we can continue to keep the arts accessible to everyone in our community.
Record-breaking visitor numbers (Again!)
In 2023, we welcomed a staggering 193,000 people into our hall. That number increased by 19% in 2024 to 229,000. All of those people were attending the 1,119 events we held at the venue, equating to three events per day. Thank you for making us a home for so many wonderful shared experiences, whether it’s weddings, retirement parties, dance recitals, or Broadway shows.
Book Club
As a part of The Lincoln Center’s commitment to bring the arts to all walks of the community, we introduced a monthly Theatrical Book Club where we discussed how to read plays, theater’s impacts on the literary world, reading scripts through intersectional lenses, and creating a community through a mutual love of theatrical art. We were also lucky to have theater professionals lead discussions and share their expertise and perspectives.
Costume Contests
Thank you to everyone who participated in our costume contests this year. We loved seeing your creativity shine, and we are so grateful that you share your enthusiasm for the art we present with your friends, family, and fellow community members.
A Día to remember!
We were so excited to welcome Sugar Skull! Día de Muertos Musical Adventure! during Hispanic Heritage Month. To create a more immersive experience, we asked local artists Liz Ortiz (Mad Hare Press) and Veronica Venzor to facilitate make-and-take art projects like Día-inspired prints and papel picado before the show. The response was overwhelming, and we loved seeing all the smiling families in our hall.
Thank you to everyone who came through our doors looking for community, inspiration, and creativity. Thank you for supporting arts and culture in Northern Colorado and for making The Lincoln Center a part of your lives. We may be finished with our 2024-2025 season, but there is so much more to look forward to. We will announce our 2025-2026 season lineup in June, so keep an eye on your inbox! We can’t wait to share all the amazing art, experiences and memories that lie ahead!