What is the Stagebrush Theatre?
It’s a small playhouse on Second Street, west of Scottsdale Road, a block below the Main Street galleries. Most visitors walk past it. Most families who have lived in Scottsdale for a while have sat in it at least once, watching their own kid or a friend’s kid sing.
The Stagebrush Theatre opened on October 7, 1968, with Moss Hart’s comedy Light Up the Sky and a black-tie party. It was built for the Scottsdale Community Players, an amateur company that formed in 1951 and had spent years performing in a barn. The city owns the building. It seats 209.
Since the 1980s the Stagebrush has belonged in practice to Greasepaint Youtheatre, which Wendy Leonard co-founded in 1984 as the Players’ youth wing. Greasepaint casts young performers in full musicals, runs classes and camps, and hires local theater artists to work on them. It has won more than 100 AriZoni Awards, Arizona’s local theater honors, and more than 30 National Youth Theatre Awards. When the adult company shut down in the late 2000s, the youth wing kept the lights on, and in 2013 it brought the Players back with Fiddler on the Roof. The nonprofit is still legally the Scottsdale Community Players, doing business as Greasepaint.
How to go
Check the season first. Greasepaint runs a short season. In 2026 it staged Madagascar – A Musical Adventure Jr. from February 20 to March 1 and Hadestown: Teen Edition from May 1 to 10, held a gala called “Hats Off to Greasepaint!”, and ran camps including Greasepaint’s Got Talent in July for ages 6 to 13. The company also offers spring and summer break camps and Bare Bones Improv Comedy classes. As of early October 2026 we couldn’t find 2026–27 productions on the ticket listings, so look before you plan. One warning: the company’s old web address, greasepaint.org, now leads to an unrelated gambling site. Don’t buy tickets through anything that turns up there.
Park close. There’s a public parking lot on First Street just north of the theater, and the free Old Town garages are a few minutes’ walk.
Expect a small room. With 209 seats, every seat is close. These are youth productions, often with big casts, and the audience is mostly families. That’s the point. If you have kids who are curious about theater, a Greasepaint show or camp is one of the easiest ways in. The company says it employs more than 50 local artists each season and makes a point of hiring its own alumni.
Make an evening of it. The Main Street arts district and Marshall Way galleries are a block or two north, and Western Spirit is a short walk northeast. For a bigger stage, the Scottsdale Center for the Performing Arts is across Scottsdale Road on the Civic Center. Our Scottsdale with kids guide has more for families.
From a barn to Second Street
The Scottsdale Community Players formed in 1951 and produced their first season in 1952, when Scottsdale was a small Western-themed town that had only just incorporated. Before the Stagebrush, the company played in a barn. An actress who worked there remembered in 1961 that “the sound of rain on the tin roof would drown us out and there were no toilets.” The site’s history of the Civic Center Library records an earlier Stagebrush on the grounds of the Adobe House (1897–1970), the building where volunteers opened Scottsdale’s first library in 1955. Historian Joan Fudala places that site under what is now the library’s parking garage. The Civic Center was built over that neighborhood in the late 1960s. Our barrio note tells that story.
In September 1968 the Scottsdale Progress announced that the new Stagebrush Theatre would open on October 7 with Light Up the Sky and a black-tie party. That’s the building on Second Street. It opened the same year as Bennie Gonzales’s City Hall and library across Scottsdale Road, and seven years before the city opened its professional arts center on the Civic Center. For decades the city-owned Stagebrush was the Players’ home.
The youth wing that outlasted the company
Greasepaint started in 1984. Wendy Leonard co-founded it, and, in a theater historian’s words, “slowly, Greasepaint began turning a profit and became a regular part of Stagebrush Theatre.” Its marquee year was 1995, when its award-winning Peter Pan moved from the 209-seat Stagebrush to the Scottsdale Center for the Performing Arts, then called the Scottsdale Center for the Arts, and played to about 700 people. Leonard left in 1999 after fourteen years as founding artistic director. T.J. Weltzien succeeded her, and Larry Loeber, the company’s musical director for ten years, became business manager.
The adult company didn’t last. In the late 2000s, by the same account, “a weak economy and changing public tastes brought its long run to an end.” Greasepaint survived and kept operating out of the Stagebrush. In 2013 its leaders revived the Scottsdale Community Players with Fiddler on the Roof, which sold out.
Why it matters
Old Town’s arts scene is mostly professional and mostly for sale: galleries, a contemporary museum, a touring hall. The Stagebrush is the one room in the district where the people on stage are local kids and the people in the seats are their families. It has been doing that on the same corner since 1968, through the closing of its original company. If it’s dark when you pass, it’s probably between seasons.