Alongside a thriving restaurant scene, the hub of entertainment in many small towns in America is a local theater.
In Chester County, West Chester, with its just-debuted Knauer Performing Arts Center, joins Phoenixville and its legendary show hall, the Colonial Theatre, on the map for a great night out, according to a Philadelphia Inquirer report by Alan Heavens.
Knauer just celebrated its New Year’s Eve grand opening, the culmination of six years of painstaking progress by the Uptown! Entertainment Alliance toward finding a home and converting the borough’s old armory building into an entertainment epicenter. Knauer now hosts eight resident theater companies, and boasts an aggressive first year of programming.
Meanwhile, the 1903-built Colonial Theatre has been the anchor around which Phoenixville’s downtown revival has rallied.
“The place made famous by the late-1950s sci-fi cult classic The Blob didn’t have much in the way of other nightlife at first, but since then, the area — Bridge Street, in particular — has come a long way,” the article stated.
Nearly a dozen restaurants now complement the Colonial’s ongoing schedule of independent and classic films and live shows.
