What it is
The Mesa Arts Center is the largest arts complex in Arizona: seven acres at the corner of Main and Center streets in downtown Mesa, more than 210,000 square feet of theaters, galleries and studios under a run of glass and steel shade canopies, with a water channel down the middle of the campus and a plaza that opens onto Main Street. It opened in 2005, designed by Bora Architects of Portland with DWL of Phoenix, and it gave a city of half a million the thing it had never had.
There are four theaters. The Ikeda, with 1,600 seats, is the big room, the one that gets the Broadway tours, the touring comedians and the concerts; the Virginia G. Piper Repertory Theater, with 550, takes the mid-size work; the Nesbitt/Elliott Playhouse and the 99-seat Farnsworth Studio hold the small and the experimental. The Mesa Contemporary Arts Museum, five galleries and 5,500 square feet, is free. Working studios teach ceramics, glass, metal and printmaking to anyone who signs up.
Why leave Scottsdale for it
Because Scottsdale’s own hall, the Scottsdale Center for the Performing Arts, holds 853 people in its main hall, and some shows need 1,600. The Broadway tours that come to the Valley split between ASU Gammage in Tempe and the Ikeda, and the touring musicians who are too big for a club and too small for an arena end up here. If the show you want is not on the Scottsdale calendar, this is where to look next, and the drive is shorter than downtown Phoenix.
The practical version
Twenty-eight minutes from Old Town via the 101, the 202 and Country Club Drive. City garages sit a block away; the Center/Main light-rail station is across the street if you are coming from Tempe. Shows are evenings and weekend matinees; the museum is a daytime visit, Tuesday through Sunday, with late hours on the second Friday and third Thursday. Eat on Main Street before, not at the venue.
When to go
The season runs September through May, with a lighter summer schedule. The Broadway subscription series lands four or five tours a season in the Ikeda, usually a week each; the National Geographic Live and classical series are single nights. Tickets for the Broadway weeks go first; a Tuesday or Wednesday performance is the way in.
Second Fridays are downtown Mesa’s monthly night out, when Main Street’s shops and galleries stay open late and the arts center museum runs until 10 PM. Third Thursdays are the museum’s other late night. Either one, combined with a show, is the full version of the evening.
What to see
The Ikeda is a conventional proscenium house with good sightlines from the orchestra and the first balcony; the second balcony is far but not bad for a concert. The Piper is the better room for plays and dance. The museum’s five galleries change several times a year and lean contemporary and regional; with SMoCA, which our museums note covers, it is one of the two contemporary rooms in the East Valley worth a detour.
The neighborhood
The campus opens onto Main Street, which has quietly become one of the Valley’s better small downtowns: a sandwich at Worth Takeaway two blocks west, cider at Cider Corps on Robson, empanadas at Republica Empanada a few blocks east on First Avenue, and the Arizona Museum of Natural History and the i.d.e.a. Museum within a five-minute walk for a daytime pairing with kids.
The story
Mesa spent most of the twentieth century as a farm town that became a very large suburb without ever acquiring a downtown anyone visited. The arts center was the deliberate correction. In the late 1990s the city committed to a cultural campus at the head of Main Street, hired Bora Architects of Portland, who had done performing-arts buildings across the Northwest, with DWL of Phoenix, and broke ground in 2002. The complex opened in 2005 at a cost in the range of 90 to 95 million dollars, and it was immediately the largest arts complex in Arizona.
The design was the argument: rather than one monumental hall, a village of theaters and studios around an outdoor spine, with shade canopies that make the plazas usable in May and a channel of water running toward Main Street. The programming followed, with a Broadway series that made Mesa, not Scottsdale, the East Valley’s stop for touring musicals, and a studio program that turned the center into a working school as much as a venue. The light rail arrived at the front door in 2015, and the downtown around it, which the arts center had been waiting for, began to fill in with restaurants, a cidery and an Arizona State University media campus a block away.
The Scottsdale connection
Scottsdale opened its own performing-arts center in 1975 on the Civic Center mall, with an 853-seat main hall, and for thirty years it was the East Valley’s cultural address. Mesa’s center did not replace it so much as take over the half of the calendar Scottsdale’s room could never hold, and the two now share subscribers, touring routes and, in the case of the museums, a regional contemporary-art circuit with SMoCA. A Scottsdale visitor with two free evenings and a taste for theater will likely spend one in each.
Getting there
The 101 south to the 202 east, exit Country Club Drive, south to Main Street, east three blocks; the campus is on the southeast corner of Main and Center. Twenty-eight minutes from Old Town, thirty-five from the Camelback corridor. Garages on First Avenue and Centennial Way are a short walk. The light rail’s Center/Main station is directly across Main; our getting around note explains why the train is useful from Tempe and useless from Scottsdale.