More spaces for standing at Ovation as venue nears one-year countdown

At this time next year, if all goes well, you’ll be able to buy tickets for the first shows at Lansing’s Ovation.

With standing room for 2,250, Ovation will unlock a new tier of touring artists who have avoided the Greater Lansing region for years.

“They’re saying October of 2027 is the projected date,” said Dominic Cochran, founding director of the Ovation Center of Music and Arts. “We’re not talent buying and show booking but we are having conversations.”

The first bookings will likely happen as soon as the building is enclosed, when the venue and the bookers can be confident, Cochran said.

The next step for enclosing the building is putting up the visible walls and elevator shafts, with masonry work expected to start this week. That might get pushed back a day or two depending on how much the ground has dried up from the super-soaker last week.

“Six weeks after that is when steel goes on site,” Cochran said, “and it gets real when the steel goes up.”

After decades of waiting, a bit of rain isn’t a problem.

Having walls and steel will be a relief for music fans and for Cochran. 

Years of delays have made people hungry for progress and most of the visible work so far has been on the neighboring Lansing Public Media Center.

The center opened with a late May ribbon-cutting and an outdoor concert by local indie group LVRS, the first concert at the Ovation site. Bookmark that little LVRS nugget; it’ll be a trivia question years from now when Ovation has brought a lot of big names into town.

The Public Media Center is one of the most unique parts of Ovation, a built-in place for young people and adults to learn music production and other skills and to get a front-row seat to some of the largest acts in the region.

Cochran said a public media center integrated into a venue like this is beyond rare and adds an incentive that makes Lansing a destination for touring acts and promoters.

“You can go to the media center as a kid interested in music or production and learn how to do it and have the tools and grow and be doing all that attached to the place where your favorite artist is coming through,” Cochran said. “There’s going to be a lot of kids saying ‘I can play on that stage and creating that desire early on will help with our retention.”

Touring acts are struggling and audiences are gripping tight to their wallets in Greater Lansing as with other places and because of that, just like with other venues, Ovation looks for sponsors and donors.

There is a big push for small donors, with ownership pins and recognition that will now include digital light projections. Your name could be on the wall, projected in the signature palette of visiting artists, say the polka dot scheme of Angine de Poitrine or the Spartan Green of Michigan State University.

Cochran said the Public Media Center opens doors, not only for Lansing’s youth, but for donors.

“They tell us they’re not interested in venues, they’re only interested in STEAM projects,” Cochran said, about the Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, Mathematics acronym. “Well, we do STEAM here.”

Donors have seen the public media attachment and the community portion as a huge difference between this and a typical venue, Cochran said.

Ovation aims to be the center of Lansing’s entertainment world

Plans for a large venue in downtown Lansing date back at least to the 1990s and for years there were financial struggles for the building, which is expected to come in at $28 million. The current iteration came after a redesign a year ago, which scaled back what was intended to be a cantilevered roof as steel tariffs and labor costs drove up initial estimates.

The latest changes have mostly been small internal ones, with the standing capacity growing a bit since the late May projections, Cochran said.

With a standing capacity of 2,250, it won’t be the biggest venue in Greater Lansing. Spartan Stadium and Breslin Center have far more capacity but aren’t typically music venues.

Ovation would be more than twice the size of Grewal Hall, which has a standing capacity of around 900 and itself unlocked a tier of touring artists like Don Was & the Pan-Detroit Ensemble, The Verve Pipe, PUP and CupcaKKe.

Most concerts in Lansing’s ecosystem happen at smaller venues like The Green Door, Macs Bar, The Robin Theatre, UrbanBeat and more.

City Pulse’s Live&Local lists up to 50 venues a week, many of them even smaller than those, so there are lots of places for shows across the spectrum but Ovation would add a whole new tier of acts for Lansing.

The Ovation/Grewal Hall truce

Having lots of venues in the same place is usually an advantage, Cochran said, because it fosters a community and gets people used to seeing shows and having options.

There’s the flexibility of having smaller venues nearby in case ticket sales collapse, with the flipside being that producers could upgrade a show from Grewal to Ovation if sales get strong enough early on.

Ovation has already started conversations with Grewal Hall about avoiding head-to-head nights.

“The lightest end of cooperation is collaborating in genre,” Cochran said. “We don’t have the audience yet where we can both have an R&B show, we would cannibalize the audience for each other so we’re not going to do the same genre on the same night.”

Cochran said Grewal Hall books and produces its own shows.

Ovation will likely produce only about 10% of its own shows, with producers from Grewal Hall and other local venues working to bring in a wide variety of talent.

Cochran said he tried to book a De La Soul show at MSU’s auditorium in the mid-1990s and Ovation would be a venue for promoters to get shows like that into the Greater Lansing area.

“We’ve ended up with an entertainment district that wasn’t envisioned that way from the beginning,” Cochran said. “It starts with The Robin Theatre on the smaller end and in our area that’s a 250-capacity, and there’s Grewal at around 900. Our big room is 2,250 in its latest occupancy, a bit more than originally designed.”

Hold up, what’s the parking situation?

Ovation is not building their own parking garage.

Cochran said parking studies recommended 600-700 spaces for the venue.

“There are 1,500 spaces within a two- or three-block radius; they’re all free after 5 p.m.,” Cochran said.

If you’re seeing a sold-out show in the middle of a workweek while the Capitol is in session or there’s a major protest in town, there might be a challenge with parking.

But if you’re seeing a show in the evening, like most shows, you should be able to find parking, and Ovation plans to offer valet parking when it fits the performance.