It’s almost a cliché to say there’s not a bad seat in the house, but at OWA Theater in Foley it is literally true. The front row is close enough that you could wait for a quiet moment between songs and offer a performer encouragement without raising your voice. Even the back row, theater manager Bran Kilpatrick notes, would be considered a premium seat at most venues.
The two-story theater on the grounds of OWA Parks & Resort seats up to 437 people — 409 cushioned chairs facing the stage on the first level, and another 28 in an upstairs balcony arranged with theater seats and pub-style tables. Professional lighting and sound give it a big-time feel; the footprint gives it something bigger halls can’t. “It’s very intimate,” Kilpatrick says. “It sits like a theater and sounds like a club.”
From Legends in Concert to a full calendar
The venue opened in 2019 as a Legends in Concert theater, running a Vegas-style tribute show five days a week — “20 minutes of Michael Jackson and then 20 minutes of Madonna,” as Kilpatrick describes it. When the Legends contract ended, the bookings stayed on the same path, and for seven years the theater has been synonymous with tribute acts. That tradition continues: the upcoming schedule includes shows honoring Garth Brooks, Guns N’ Roses and the Beach Boys.
Kilpatrick, who took over in the summer of 2025 after a year as entertainment director at the Hangout in Gulf Shores, has widened the programming considerably. The calendar now mixes country, rock and R&B artists with nationally touring comedians, plus a category he calls breakout acts — artists who have outgrown the bar circuit but haven’t yet graduated to 1,500-seat rooms. That slate includes British soul singer MT Jones (with local band 12Eleven opening) on Sept. 16, soulful singer-songwriter Devon Gilfillian on Oct. 19 and Canadian blues guitarist Jesse Roper on Nov. 5, with Fairhope’s own Sugarcane Jane as support.
Stripped-back stars
The room’s size is also its selling pitch to established artists. Country star Pam Tillis brought her trio — rather than her arena production — to the theater for a pared-down evening, with Sylacauga singer-songwriter Patrick Barnett opening acoustically.
“We’re set up perfectly for stuff like that, so we’re reaching out to other artists that normally put on bigger shows to see if they’re interested in doing a stripped-back version,” Kilpatrick says. “It gives them a chance to reconnect with their fan base and to tell the stories behind their songs.”
It’s a niche, and Kilpatrick is candid about its limits. High-energy rock shows that demand a mosh pit or a dance floor don’t fit a 437-seat listening room — the theater is about a fourth the size of other performance halls in the region. But for singer-songwriters, blues players and comedians, the room is close to ideal.
Baldwin County’s home for the blues
One of Kilpatrick’s signature moves is the theater’s deepening relationship with the Frank Brown International Songwriters Festival, the November tradition based at the Flora-Bama that spreads across dozens of venues. OWA Theater became an official Frank Brown venue last year, hosting Taylor Hicks and Larry Gatlin on consecutive nights during the festival’s week-long run. This fall it debuts as the festival’s official blues venue, with two heavyweight bookings: guitarist Coco Montoya on Tuesday, Nov. 10 and Tab Benoit on Thursday, Nov. 12.
Blues guitarist Tinsley Ellis is already booked for March, and Kilpatrick intends to keep going. “I’m excited about it because there’s not a blues venue in Baldwin County or right here on the Coast,” he says. “Even though we’re not entirely dedicated to it, we want to showcase some of the very best musicians that people might not know about from a genre that was pretty much the mother of all music.”
The man booking the room
Kilpatrick’s route to Foley ran through comedy. An Anniston native, he spent 18 years in electromechanical engineering while performing stand-up on the side, and the comedy circuit gave him his first experience booking and promoting shows. The entertainment side won. After 18 years of engineering, he switched to entertainment management, spent a year at the Hangout, and then moved to OWA.
His booking philosophy is straightforward: build loyalty to the room itself. “The goal for me is that people will want to come here all the time, not necessarily because of a specific artist that’s playing here but because they know that the shows here are amazing,” he says.
For Baldwin County audiences accustomed to driving to Mobile’s Saenger or Pensacola’s larger halls for national acts, OWA Theater offers a different proposition: the same artists, four times closer, with no seat far from the stage and parking a short walk away on the resort’s grounds. In a county that keeps growing, a 437-seat listening room with a blues pedigree may be exactly the right size.