Groove in the Garden began in 2015 with a slate of bands mostly from the Triangle assembled to play the amphitheater at Raleigh Little Theatre, which turns out to be an excellent site for a small urban music festival.
The RLT's Louise "Scottie" Stephenson Amphitheatre seats up to 2,000 people before a huge stage. Its grassed levels are wide enough to accommodate camp chairs and/or stretching out on the grass or blankets by those who don't want to sit on the cement.
Shade cast by trees at stage left slowly but surely shielded the crowd as the afternoon passed. After holding it in mid-August for two years, organizers moved the festival to a late-October date in 2017.
"Garden" refers to the RLT's rose garden, which is actually a city park, that sits behind the amphitheater stage. Read more about the rose garden.
For the festival, a few food trucks occupied the RLT's parking lot and more than a dozen vendors lined a grove adjacent to the rose garden. Beer and wine were on sale, too. Food truck lines got long toward dinner time, and a couple quit taking orders so they could get caught up. So there's opportunity for additional food vendors at subsequent festivals.
The RLT and the rose garden are in a residential area, which means parking was on the street and not always convenient.
A second potential problem you may have noticed from our photos is that the amphitheater's stage is not covered. Rain would presumably require cancelling or rescheduling the festival, since the RLT's indoor theaters are much smaller. On the other hand, a tent of some kind may be in the works. As of Spring 2017, the website says "unless there is a severe storm warning, the show will go on!"
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