Crown Jewels
BY NATHAN WALLS M
The Crown Center complex offers something for everyone
has a 6,000 seat arena and 2,400 seat theatre to boot.
arshall Perry's enthusiasm is easy to catch as you walk with him around the 10,000 seat Crown Coliseum, past the Crown ballrooms and into the 60,000 square feet Expo Cen- ter. As the Crown's director of marketing and sales, he has a good product to peddle, and he knows it. Not only does he have the aforementioned venues to offer promoters, but he
"It makes my job easier when I have multiple types of venues to offer to a promoter," Perry said. "We are constantly being contacted by promoters, event organizers, meetings, conventions or any type of thing that you can imagine where they say I am looking for a venue that will sell 4,000 tickets, or a show with 10,000 tickets, or a theatre presentation that's going to be about 1,500 tickets. No matter who contacts us or who we reach out to, we have the venue to make it fit."
With each of those venues combined under the Crown Center umbrella, the complex sold over 500,000 tickets in 2011.
Some recent events the complex has hosted include: country music and hip-hop concerts, theater presentations, the Community Concert Series, the Cumberland County Fair, mon- ster truck shows, professional bull riding, WWE, the Eastern Regional North Carolina boys basketball tournament, Fayetteville Fireantz hockey, Cape Fear Heroes football, Cumberland County Schools graduations, the East Coast Step Show, Disney on Ice and the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus.
"We had Jason Aldean, who sold out the entire coliseum," Perry said. "The total was 10,024 tickets that were sold. Miranda Lambert, she's a rising star and she's doing quite well. This is twice now we've had Jason in three years. It was a huge economic impact for Cumberland County, because we had a large amount of people
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