Alpine Valley Music Theatre — Attraction in Town of Lafayette

I would give zero stars if I could. Bought 3 tickets to the Tyler Childers show the day they went on sale for the GA-Lawn. We traveled over 3 hours to see this show. I assumed purchasing lawn tickets and heading to the venue 2+ hours early we could find a spot in the grass to spread our blanket and find a good spot for the show. I was wrong. We followed the signs to the entrance and got in a long, slow moving line of cars to get in. We waited in the car line for over an hour and even though we had paid in advance for premiere parking, we were only allowed to drive into general admission parking - we chose premiere parking as we took our 8 year old son to this show. There were NO SIGNS for GA parking/premiere parking until it was too late to go anywhere but forward. We parked in the GA parking since we were finally out of the car line and hoofed it to the venue, we didn't want to miss the show we paid good money to see. Once we got to the top of the hill where the venue was, we had to backtrack through parking lots to get in line to get in. I was treated like a criminal going through security - I had a clear bag the size that was approved that was searched, I had to open feminine care products and shake everything out that was in the bag. I understand a need for strict security, but if you have a list of items allowed on the website, there should be no problem brining those in. Once we finally made it into the venue, there were SO many people. We walked over to the lawn to find every single spot in the lawn was completely full - with thousands of people still pouring in. We were finally able to somewhat find a spot about as far back as you could and barely still see the top of the amphitheater and screens. Once the show finally started, people were pretty much sitting on top of each other because there was no where for anyone to go. Alpine Valley vastly oversold this show - it was dangerously overcrowded. The sound was awful from where we were at, if you are going to pack over 30,000 people into a venue, you should have a sound system that can reach everyone's ears. Having been to over 100 shows in my lifetime I have never encountered a venue this mismanaged. We left about 2/3 through the show, as did a lot of the crowd I'm guessing because they did not want to deal with the nightmare traffic getting out as it was getting in. I understand the traffic is what makes Alpine Valley "nostalgic", but its not the flex they think it is. On top of all of that, the price gouging and lack of porta-potties was astounding. We will never return to this venue, which is a bummer because it seems like it could be a really great place...

Google has an automated system that removes bad reviews if a place is potentially getting brigaded with bad press, so here I am two months later trying to repost this. These are my personal opinions and experiences from the Noah Kahn concert of 7/13/24:

What all of the other reviews said were 100% true. While we didn't personally have an issue with arrival, once we were in the gates of the actual venue, everything started to go wrong. A large storm was rolling in, and they asked those with lawn seats to go back to their cars. Nobody moved; everyone figured since the people under the roof weren't asked to leave, we weren't in actual danger.

We were told to watch social media and to subscribe to text messages, along with tuning into a radio station so that they could update everyone. But here's the thing: nobody - and I mean nobody - had cell service. Picture 30k+ people not willing to hike back to their cars during severe weather huddled in a large room waiting for someone who knew something to give us any shred of information.

What ended up happening: everyone asked wandering employees what was going on. Some staff knew, some speculated, and apparently some were even sent home. Once we saw staff leaving, we had a hunch that it was over and that the show would be postponed, but it wasn't until much, much later that the official announcement was given. Via text. To people who did not have cell service.

The exodus was another fiasco entirely. It's unclear to me exactly what happened. All I know is that I sat in the car for ninety minutes before moving an inch. This number is not an exaggeration. Despite having multiple entrances, the entire attendance was funneled through one road with only a scant few employees waving people through. I recall seeing an East Troy Sheriff sitting in his car watching this all unfold, doing nothing. But that's a whole other can of worms.

At the end of the day, in my opinion, this is a matter of safety. I've ready reviews about the Dave Matthews concert held before this one. It sounds like they dealt with the same thing - possibly under threat of weather even more extreme than what we faced. Yet story played out exactly the same. Confused people waiting for answers, stranded in an information desert whose best course of action is to simply guess at how...

Noah Kahan was amazing but honestly the whole experience was terrible. We bought tickets for the July show and as you can read in other reviews, it was a mess.

No one gets service at this venue so we had no idea a storm was approaching. Right as the show was supposed to start, they announced that it would be delayed due to a storm coming and directed us to go back to our cars. We ended up going under the sheltered area rather than our car and found ourselves packed into a building with several hundred other people with no idea what was happening. Several staff told us they didn’t have service either so no one could really provide us with any info on this storm. As the storm got worse, we had no choice but to stay under this shelter until about 10:30pm when they finally announced that it would be rescheduled. When we left, there was no one directing traffic and we spent 2 hours just trying to get out of the parking lot (literally not moving an inch for at least the first hour). I figured this was just because it was storming so bad that they didn’t want staff out there to direct anyone.

Fast forward to tonight, which was the rescheduled show. I had to take time off work since it got rescheduled to a Wednesday but I was determined to go since we couldn’t get refunds. We got there early, found better seats this time, and got to watch a great performance. But we again encountered the same parking lot issue. We got to our car at 11:30pm after the show and didn’t move an inch for 45 minutes as the cars backed up. We found a different path and were able to slightly move but the parking lot became just a giant free for all so there were probably 10 lanes filled with cars all trying to filter into the same line. We didn’t get out of the parking lot until 2am and still have an hour drive home. As we got closer to the exit, we had to try to compete with 4 other cars to get into the exit lane (with one of those cars nearly hitting us) despite a staff member standing literally right there and making no effort to direct any of the traffic.

The venue is pretty and the show itself was good but I will lose my mind if I ever have to experience this parking lot again so unfortunately, this was probably my last...