What it is
Grady Gammage Memorial Auditorium is the round, pink and tan concert hall at the corner of Mill Avenue and Apache Boulevard, at the southern edge of the ASU campus. Frank Lloyd Wright designed it in the last two years of his life, at ninety, by adapting the plans for an opera house he had drawn for the king of Iraq; the king was killed in the 1958 revolution and the Baghdad project died, so the design came to Tempe instead. Wright died in April 1959 and Grady Gammage, the ASU president who had commissioned it, that December. The apprentices at Taliesin finished the building, and it opened in September 1964 with the Philadelphia Orchestra.
It seats 3,017 under a shallow round roof carried on fifty concrete columns, and the two long bridges that reach out from the sides, so the crowd can pour down to the parking lots, are the detail everyone remembers. It is the Valley’s Broadway house: the national tours play here, ten musicals a season from September to August, and the Broadway series pays nine-tenths of the building’s bills. It also hosted a presidential debate in 2004, and in any given month there are concerts, lectures and the university’s own events.
Why leave Scottsdale for it
Two reasons. The first is that this is where the touring Broadway shows play in Arizona, and Scottsdale’s own Center for the Performing Arts is a fine hall of a quarter the size that does not book them. The second is Wright. If you have been to Taliesin West, the house he built in the McDowell foothills, Gammage is the other half of the story: the public building he drew there and never saw. Our Frank Lloyd Wright note puts the two together.
The practical version
Twenty minutes from Old Town: Scottsdale Road to the 202, one exit, Mill Avenue south through downtown Tempe and the campus to Apache. Park in the lots east of the hall or the Omni’s garage across Mill and eat on Mill first. Buy tickets early; the subscribers get first call. Arrive forty-five minutes ahead to walk the outside, which is the best part and free.
When to go
The Broadway season runs September through August, with the biggest titles in the cool months. For 2026–27: The Phantom of the Opera opened the season in September and October; Water for Elephants runs the last week of October; The Outsiders is late January 2027, Operation Mincemeat late February, Buena Vista Social Club in April, the Betty Boop musical in May, The Sound of Music in June and Death Becomes Her closes in August. A Grinch musical in the first week of December and Beetlejuice over New Year’s are sold outside the subscription. Shows run Tuesday to Sunday with weekend matinees; the Tuesday and Wednesday evenings are the easiest tickets.
For the building itself, go on a weekday afternoon in any month, walk the colonnade and the bridges, and look at the roof from the lawn to the south; the inside is for show nights.
The seats
The hall is known for its acoustics; Wright detached the balcony from the back wall so sound could travel behind it, and it works. Center orchestra under the overhang and the front of the grand tier are the best seats for a musical. The far sides of the orchestra are a long way from the stage. The balcony is high but the sound is still good, and the balcony subscription is the cheap way to see the whole season.
Dinner first
The Omni Tempe across Mill Avenue opened in 2023 with Gammage in mind and has a bar that looks at it. Otherwise it is a ten-minute walk north up Mill into the district, where Pedal Haus at 7th Street is the easy pre-show table; leave by seven for an eight o’clock curtain.
With kids
The Grinch and Beetlejuice weeks are built for them, and the hall is a lesson in architecture a ten-year-old can see: round building, bridges, columns. The regular Broadway titles run two and a half hours with one intermission.
The story
In 1957 Grady Gammage, who had turned the Tempe teachers’ college into Arizona State University and won the statewide vote on its name, asked his friend Frank Lloyd Wright to design the auditorium the new university needed. Wright was ninety and living at Taliesin West in the winters. He had, in his drawer, a circular opera house drawn for Baghdad at the invitation of King Faisal II, part of a grand plan for the city that the 1958 revolution ended. He reworked the opera house for a university campus in the desert: a round hall 300 feet long and 250 wide under a flat roof on fifty columns, in his late palette of desert rose and sand, with two bridges reaching out to the parking lots so that the audience would leave the building, he said, like water off a plate. Wright died in April 1959. Gammage died that December. William Wesley Peters, Wright’s son-in-law and chief apprentice, and the Taliesin Associated Architects carried the drawings to completion, and the Philadelphia Orchestra under Eugene Ormandy played the opening on September 18, 1964.
The building has been many things since: the university’s graduation hall, the home of a Broadway touring series that grew from the 1990s into the season that now pays nine-tenths of the building’s bills, the site of the third Bush-Kerry debate on October 13, 2004, and the most visited Wright building in Arizona by a wide margin, since most of the people inside it on a given night are not thinking about the architect.
The Scottsdale connection
The drawings were made in Scottsdale, at Taliesin West, where the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation still keeps the archive of the practice. The spire Wright drew for the Arizona capitol in 1957, built decades later at Scottsdale Road and Frank Lloyd Wright Boulevard, is from the same two years; our spire guide and the Wright note trace the late Arizona work. Gammage is the one piece of it you can sit inside for three hours.
Getting there
Scottsdale Road south to the westbound 202, one exit to Mill Avenue, south through downtown Tempe and the campus to Apache Boulevard; the lots are east of the hall off Apache and Forest Avenue. The light rail stops at Mill and Apache, three minutes from the doors, which is the painless way back to a Tempe hotel or the airport. From North Scottsdale the 101 to the 202 is quicker than Scottsdale Road.