A Field Guide to Green Bay & the Fox Valley's Live-Music Rooms
Around here we measure a town by its stadium. Fair enough. But a region that fills 80,000 seats on a Sunday in December has quietly built itself an off-season sport, too, and it runs from a converted movie palace on Walnut Street clear down to a riverbank in Oshkosh. Before the summer schedule swallows you whole, here's your field guide to the rooms where the Fox Valley actually plays.
The Tarlton Theatre — Green Bay (405–409 Walnut St). Start at the soul of the thing. This Art Deco "drafthouse," built circa 1924–25, still throws the biggest original movie screen in the city, but the real story is what surrounds it: a 501(c)(3) slowly restoring the bones of the place, a resident Jazz Orchestra, the Green Bay Film Festival, and the free "Wednesdays On Walnut" series out on the adjacent Truck Yard lot. It is the rare venue that feels like a neighborhood association and a nightclub at once.
EPIC Event Center — Green Bay (2351 Holmgren Way). If the Tarlton is the soul, EPIC is the muscle. Opened April 2021 in the shadow of Lambeau, this 25,000-square-foot club holds up to 2,185 bodies and fronts them with a 45-by-35-foot stage — big enough that when a national rock, country or metal tour swings through the window, this is almost certainly where it lands. You can walk here from the stadium. People do.
Meyer Theatre — Green Bay (117 S Washington St). The grand dame. It opened February 14, 1930 as the Fox Theatre, an atmospheric Spanish-Renaissance fantasy by architect Larry P. Larsen with 2,037 seats. It went dark as a movie house in 1998, then rose again February 27, 2002 after an roughly $8 million restoration that rebuilt its original 1930 Wurlitzer pipe organ from the blueprints up. Now about 1,011 seats, and gorgeous — though touring concerts stay away in high summer (the calendar's first big name is the Oak Ridge Boys on Sept 10).
The Grand Oshkosh (Grand Opera House) — Oshkosh (100 High Ave). A jewel box from 1883, designed by local architect William Waters, 550 seats, on the National Register since 1974. A roughly $2 million restoration in 2009–2010 brought back the chandelier and added a Grand Lounge, and the house is now reportedly in the middle of a $10 million expansion. Victorian opera houses this intact are not supposed to still exist in cities this size. This one does.
Fox Cities Performing Arts Center — Appleton (400 W College Ave). Appleton's flagship, home to Thrivent Financial Hall and the Kimberly-Clark Theater. It's fundamentally a Broadway-season house, which means mid-summer it mostly hums with camps and contests rather than tours. Note it, then come back in the fall.
Leicht Memorial Park — Green Bay. No walls, no roof, no ticket. This riverfront green in the Broadway District is the home of Levitt AMP Green Bay, where free Sunday concerts run 4:00–6:30 p.m. from late spring into August. Bring a blanket, bring the kids, tip the band.
Leach Amphitheater — Oshkosh (303 Ceape Ave). The region's biggest summer footprint sits on the Fox River, where Waterfest turns Thursday nights into a standing-room block party (gates 5:45 p.m.). Water on one side, a wall of sound on the other — the most Wisconsin way to spend an evening that doesn't involve a brat.
Badger State Brewing — Green Bay (990 Tony Canadeo Run). And back in the stadium district, the brewery closes the loop, with a beer garden that hosts the free weekly "Live in the Garden" series deep into October and, every July, the gloriously strange GBUFO Invasion Fest.
Eight rooms, four cities, one river doing a lot of the heavy lifting. Titletown's other season is open. Go find your seat — or your patch of grass.
Sources: The Tarlton Theatre; EPIC Event Center — Upcoming Events; Meyer Theatre / Cinema Treasures; Oshkosh Grand Opera House; Leach Amphitheater; Levitt AMP Green Bay 2026; Badger State Brewing Events; Your Summer 2026 Preview