Willingboro Just Built Itself a 570-Seat Reason to Stay Home on a Saturday Night

WILLINGBORO — For years, if you lived in Burlington County and wanted to see a real show — lights up, a band on a proper stage, the whole room leaning in together — you got in the car and pointed it toward Philadelphia. Tonight, that changes, and I could not be happier about it.

The Willingboro Performing Arts Center opens this evening, and it is opening in style. The inaugural act is Atlantic Starr — yes, the Atlantic Starr, the group that soundtracked a thousand first dances with “Always.” If you are going to cut the ribbon on a new room, you cut it with a band that knows how to make 570 people feel something at the same time. That is the whole point of a place like this.

An old auditorium, reborn

Here is the detail I love most. The venue did not drop out of the sky as some gleaming new complex. It lives inside the Kennedy Center in Willingboro, in what used to be the high school auditorium. A room where generations of Willingboro kids squirmed through assemblies and clutched scripts backstage before their first play has been reborn as a professional, 570-seat performing arts house. There is poetry in that. The building already held the town’s memories. Now it gets to make new ones.

The building already held the town’s memories. Now it gets to make new ones.Jenna Joy

It took about $2 million and years of planning to get here, roughly half from township capital funds and half from the state. I know, I know — budget lines are not usually the romantic part of an arts story. But I will defend every dollar of it, because this is a town investing in the idea that its own people are worth a stage.

And that is how the township is framing it, too: as a place for people to gather, and as a spark for Willingboro’s economy.

Consider this your invitation, South Jersey. You do not live in Willingboro? Doesn’t matter. The best thing about a new room is that it belongs to whoever shows up.

What’s next on the calendar

This is not a one-night fluke, either, which is how you know somebody is building something real. The Manhattans — another legend of smooth soul — take the stage October 24. Percussionist Tito Puente Jr. brings the heat November 20. That is a lineup with range and taste, and it tells me whoever is booking this room actually respects the audience.

I have spent years in church basements and converted storefronts watching South Jersey make its own art because nobody handed it a stage. So forgive me if I get a little emotional about a town that went out and built one on purpose. Willingboro did the thing. The lights come up tonight.

Go find out what your neighbors can do.

Based on reporting from The Philadelphia Inquirer, WHYY and Hoodline.