Ralph J. Houghton Performance Center

The theatre was renamed the Ralph J. Houghton Performance Center on May 11, 2019 during a brief ceremony followed by a free concert by the local Golden Strings, Madrigal Singers, Kenosha Alumni Band and the Tremper Wind Ensemble. During the program, a portrait by the late Kenosha artist George Pollard depicting Houghton was hung in the lobby. Houghton spent 56 years in the public school district, and for over thirty years was its music director and later director of fine arts, then assistant superintendent before retiring in 1987. He died after heart surgery in 2009. The auditorium, designed by Chicago architect John D. Chubb, was noted for its superior acoustic qualities, for which Houghton frequently fielded compliments from well-known musicians and vocalists. In the mid-1950s, when Houghton was hired as the public schools' music director, he took in a performance of the Kenosha Symphony with contralto Marian Anderson from the balcony and was astounded at how much you could hear as Marian Anderson was singing. Later, Doc Severinsen, Grammy award-winning trumpeter who fronted Johnny Carson’s house band, praised the auditorium’s acoustics. Houghton’s son recalled Severinsen telling his father “Ralph, I just gotta tell ya, I’ve played all over the country and that is the finest hall as far as acoustics and the way the sound resonates in stereo. It’s just fantastic.“ At the dedicatory concert, the final number was “The Stars and Stripes Forever,” which had special significance to Houghton, who as a U.S. Army infantry captain was captured by the Germans in 1945 during the Battle of the Bulge but later escaped his captors during the Christmas holiday, making his way across Europe toward American lines where there was a band playing "The Stars and Stripes Forever”.

Your exception is noted, thanks, but it’s Kenosha’s foremost performing-arts center and concert venue (though it’ll have some competition soon) and it fits every definition of a classic theatre even though it’s attached to an operating high school.

The architect was John Chubb. There were indeed first-run motion pictures offered at one time, and to the present there are travelogue films offered on the first Friday of each month from September through April.