What it is
The Orpheum is the last of downtown Phoenix’s vaudeville and movie palaces, a 1,364-seat Spanish Baroque theater at Second Avenue and Adams Street that opened on January 5, 1929 and reopened, after the city rescued and restored it, on January 28, 1997. Lescher & Mahoney, the firm that designed most of what Phoenix built between the wars, made it an atmospheric house: the auditorium is a Spanish garden under a deep-blue plaster sky, and during the overture a projector drifts clouds across it. The ornament, murals and the sky were all redone in the 1990s by Conrad Schmitt Studios, the Wisconsin firm that specializes in exactly this kind of room.
It is a city building now, run by Phoenix Convention Center & Venues as a touring house: Broadway series, comedians, seated concerts, Ballet Arizona, and Phoenix Opera, which moved in at the reopening. It shares its block with Phoenix City Hall, which was literally built around it in the 1990s as a way of keeping it.
Why leave Scottsdale for it
Because Scottsdale has nothing like it. The Center for the Performing Arts is a fine 1970s hall, but the touring Broadway companies and the comedians who sell 1,300 seats route through the Orpheum, and the building is half the evening. A visitor who likes old theaters should see it even on a night with a show they would not otherwise pick; a visitor who likes Broadway has no other option this side of ASU Gammage in Tempe.
The practical version
Twenty-five minutes from Old Town via Loop 202 and Seventh Street. Park in a city garage on Second or Third Avenue and walk a block. Tickets are through the city’s venue site and the usual ticket services. Sit in the balcony if you want the ceiling. The Friends of the Orpheum Theatre lead tours on a posted schedule, which is the way to see the room properly; our museums and attractions note ranks it among the Phoenix buildings worth a trip on their own.
When to go
The season runs September through May, with the touring Broadway engagements usually in blocks of a week or two and the one-night comedy and concert dates between them. Summer is quiet but not dark. A weeknight performance is the easier trip from Scottsdale: in by 7, out by 10, home by 10:30. On a weekend check whether the Suns or Diamondbacks are at home two blocks east before you decide how early to leave.
What to see inside
The lobby is a two-story Spanish court with the original terrazzo and tile. The auditorium is the point: the garden walls, the painted sky, the proscenium murals that make the stage read as a view through an archway. The mezzanine lounge has photographs of the pre-restoration house, when every surface had been painted black for the movies, and they are the best argument for the twelve years the city spent on it. If the Mighty Wurlitzer is being played before a show, it is the organ that was returned to the building by the Valley of the Sun chapter of the American Theatre Organ Society.
Where to eat
The theater has no restaurant, which is normal, and downtown’s good dinners are within a few blocks. Crescent Ballroom and its Cocina 10 kitchen are six blocks north at Second Avenue and Van Buren, and the lounge there is a reasonable after-show drink; the Luhrs Building bars on Central and Jefferson are closer.
With kids
The touring Broadway family titles and the holiday shows are the way in, and the room itself holds a ten-year-old’s attention for the first ten minutes with the ceiling alone. Balcony seats are steep; sit in the loge or the front of the orchestra with small children.
The story
Phoenix had 48,000 people in 1929 and a theater built for a city three times that size. J.E. Rickards and Harry Nace, who ran most of the town’s movie houses, spent about $750,000 on an Orpheum-circuit vaudeville palace, and sold into Paramount’s Publix chain before the year was out. The house went to talkies, took the Paramount name formally in 1951, and was bought in 1968 by James Nederlander, who renamed it Palace West and brought road shows. In the 1970s the Corona family leased it and ran Spanish-language films, concerts and boxing for a downtown that was emptying out.
By 1984 it was facing demolition. A bond to restore it had failed; Mayor Terry Goddard’s answer was to have the city buy the theater and design the new City Hall to wrap around it, which is why the two share a block. The Junior League helped get it onto the National Register in September 1985, restoration money followed in 1987, the Orpheum name came back in 1988, and the real work, by Conrad Schmitt Studios, began in 1995. It cost about fourteen million dollars against the original $750,000, and the house reopened on January 28, 1997 with Carol Channing in Hello, Dolly!, the kind of booking that told the city the gamble had worked. Phoenix Opera has been based here since.
The Scottsdale connection
Scottsdale’s own 1920s and 1930s buildings are adobe and brick, not plaster palaces, and the city never had a theater of this ambition; its cultural campus came forty years later with the Civic Center. For a Scottsdale visitor the Orpheum is the one place in the Valley to see what a Southwestern city thought a night out should look like in 1929, and the live music note sends readers here for the seated shows the resorts cannot host.
Getting there
Loop 202 west from Scottsdale to the Seventh Street exit, south to Jefferson Street, west to Second Avenue; the theater is on the north side of Adams at the City Hall plaza, about twenty-five minutes with no traffic. Park in the city garages on Second or Third Avenue. From the Camelback corridor, Seventh Avenue south is quicker. There is no rail from Scottsdale, so for a late show a rideshare both ways is the honest advice in our getting around note.