What it is
The Tempe Center for the Arts is the city of Tempe’s performing and visual arts building, opened in September 2007 on the south bank of Town Lake just west of the Mill Avenue bridges. You know it from the freeway: a roof of folded steel plates, angled like a sheet of paper creased a dozen times, that Architectural Record called Tempe’s little Sydney Opera House on the week it opened. Inside are a 600-seat proscenium theater whose four seating levels stack the audience vertically around the stage, so that nobody is far from it; a 200-seat black-box studio; the Gallery at TCA, which is free; and a lakeside room with a wall of glass over the water.
It was designed by Barton Myers Associates of Los Angeles with Architekton, a Tempe firm, and cost about $65 million, which Tempe voters agreed to pay for in 2000 with a one-tenth-percent sales tax that still covers the building’s operation. That funding is why a ticket here costs what it does.
Why leave Scottsdale for it
Scottsdale has the Scottsdale Center for the Performing Arts, which books touring names and charges accordingly. Tempe’s center is the other model: a home for resident companies. Childsplay, the children’s theater company that is the best of its kind in Arizona, plays here. So do Stray Cat Theatre, the Arizona Wind Symphony, the Tempe Symphony Orchestra and Desert Dance Theatre, and Arizona Theatre Company has used the main stage. A night of serious theater here runs a fraction of a Scottsdale ticket, the parking is free, and the building is better than anything either city has otherwise built for the arts. Our live music note sends people here for the studio-theater concerts for the same reasons.
The practical version
Twenty minutes from Old Town: 101 south, 202 west, Priest Drive exit, east on Rio Salado Parkway to the lake side. Free lot on site. Arrive an hour early for the gallery and the terrace; the sunset over the lake and the Mill Avenue bridges is part of the ticket. Downtown Tempe’s restaurants are a five-minute drive or a fifteen-minute walk across the parkway.
When to go
The season runs September through May, the Valley’s cool months, with the resident companies rotating through the main theater and studio. Childsplay’s holiday production in December is the one that sells out; book it in October. Summer is lighter, with the gallery open, some studio concerts and comedy, and the terrace too hot before sundown. The gallery changes shows several times a year and is worth a stop on its own if you are already in Tempe for the lake or Mill Avenue.
Which room
The main theater is where the plays and the orchestras go, and its stacked design means the first rows of the upper levels are closer to the stage than the back of the floor; buy there and save. The studio is a 200-seat black box used for Stray Cat’s edgier work, singer-songwriters and comedy, where every seat is close. The Lakeside room is mostly rented for events but opens for some concerts and receptions, and is the best view in the building. The gallery is off the lobby, free, and takes twenty minutes.
With kids
Childsplay is the reason. The company has produced theater for children in the Valley for decades and is in residence here, with weekend matinees that are an hour long and pitched perfectly to the age on the poster. The lakeside lawn outside is for running off the energy afterwards, and Tempe Beach Park’s playground is a short walk east along the lake. Our Scottsdale with kids note pairs a Childsplay matinee with lunch on Mill.
The neighborhood
The center sits at the west end of the Town Lake waterfront, with the Mill Avenue bridges, the pedestrian bridge and the beach park to the east and the Priest Drive marina to the west. Downtown Tempe’s bars and restaurants begin at Mill Avenue, a fifteen-minute walk; the Tempe Marketplace is three miles east along Rio Salado for a cheaper pre-show dinner.
The story
Tempe built its arts center the hard way, by asking its own voters to pay for it. In 2000 the city put Proposition 400 on the ballot, a one-tenth-percent sales tax dedicated to an arts center, and it passed, raising about $63 million for the building and a further sum for the art park beside it. The site was the newly filled Town Lake, itself a 1999 invention, and the city hired Barton Myers, the Los Angeles architect of several American performing-arts buildings, with Architekton of Tempe as the local partner. Kitchell managed the project, Arup engineered the structure and Okland built it.
The roof was the idea. Myers and Architekton folded the steel into a series of angled plates that read as a mountain range or a crumpled sheet depending on where you stand, and placed it so it is seen first from the 202 freeway and from across the lake, which is to say from everywhere. Inside, the main hall’s four stacked seating levels were a deliberate choice to keep a 600-seat house intimate. The center opened with a public festival on September 9, 2007, and Architectural Record ran its notice that week under the Sydney Opera House headline that has followed the building since.
The public art came with it: Ned Kahn’s entry marquee, set with some 8,000 marbles and small mirrors that catch the light, a fireplace, a fountain and a lobby carpet commissioned as works. The resident companies arrived over the first decade, Childsplay among the first, and the free gallery quietly became one of the better exhibition spaces in the East Valley.
The Scottsdale connection
Scottsdale built its Center for the Performing Arts in 1975 as part of the Civic Center, a generation earlier and on a different theory: a city-owned hall that books touring artists. Tempe’s building is the one Scottsdale’s arts people point to when they talk about what a resident-company model and a dedicated tax can do, and the two centers are twenty minutes apart on the same road. For a visitor the division of labor is simple: Scottsdale for the touring name, Tempe for the play.
Getting there
Loop 101 south to the 202 west, exit Priest Drive, east on Rio Salado Parkway; the center is on the lake side, with a free lot. About twenty minutes from Old Town with no traffic, and reliably twenty-five on a weeknight at curtain time. The Valley Metro streetcar runs along Rio Salado and Mill from the light rail; our getting around note has the rideshare math, and a shared ride from Old Town for a show is reasonable.