Phoenix's theatre-in-the-round has been slowly spinning audiences around its stage for six decades. The Celebrity Theatre at 440 North 32nd Street opened on 13 January 1964 with the musical South Pacific starring Betsy Palmer, built as the Phoenix Star Theatre - a convention and cultural centre commissioned by hotel magnate Del Webb for his flagship Hiway House complex. Beverly Hills architect Perry Neuschatz designed the twenty-sided prestressed-concrete drum, 196 feet in diameter, winning the .....

It is the largest art museum in the southwestern United States - 285,000 square feet holding more than 21,000 works - and it started with a building by a student of Frank Lloyd Wright. The Phoenix Art Museum, at 1625 North Central Avenue in the city's Central Corridor, opened on 18 November 1959. The original three-storey building came from Alden B. Dow, the Michigan architect who trained at Taliesin; a 1965 east wing tripled the museum to 75,000 square feet, and successive expansions - includi.....

A blues radio host got a call from his landlord-to-be and hatched a club in one meeting. The Rhythm Room at 1019 East Indian School Road in midtown Phoenix opened on 18 September 1991 with Big Pete Pearson - the city's king of the blues - on stage, conceived when property owner Lenny Frankel recruited harmonica player and KJZZ radio host Bob Corritore to book and shape a blues room in the former Purple Turtle bar. Corritore, a Chicago transplant who had played the building in its Purple Turtle .....

An elementary school district built one of Phoenix's best theatres, and the voters paid for it on purpose. The Madison Center for the Arts at 5601 North 16th Street opened in 2018, owned and operated by the Madison Elementary School District as a shared home for student performances and professional touring shows. The building is unapologetically grand for its ownership: a 904-seat state-of-the-art auditorium, an extensive veranda, and a lobby with a 40-foot ceiling that hosts galas, weddings a.....

Arizona's oldest arts organization built its newest ideas a black box. The Hormel Theatre at 1825 North Central Avenue is the flexible second stage of the Phoenix Theatre Company, opened in October 2013 as the centerpiece of one of the most significant performing arts expansions in the Southwest - a project that added a soaring glass atrium lobby, rehearsal halls and entertainment spaces to the company's Central Arts District campus. The parent institution's pedigree is remarkable: founded as t.....

The smallest room on Arizona's biggest theatre campus is where the risks get taken. The Judith Hardes Theatre at 1825 North Central Avenue is the intimate stage of the Phoenix Theatre Company, a roughly 112-seat house on the company's Central Arts District campus at Central Avenue and McDowell Road. The company it serves is the state's founding arts institution: begun as the Phoenix Players in 1920 and resident on this ground since the Heard family's coach house became its home in 1924, incorpo.....

Where the Mason Jar once stood, the Rebel Lounge now carries on a rock-and-roll tradition that has run through the same building on Indian School Road for decades. The Mason Jar opened on the site in 1979 and became one of central Phoenix's premier clubs, a quintessential 1980s rock room that hosted acts on their way to stardom, from Rage Against the Machine, Tool and Jane's Addiction to Green Day, Guns N' Roses and Nirvana, and later the Black Keys, Fall Out Boy and Jimmy Eat World. After the .....

Nirvana, Tool and Pearl Jam played this address when it was the Mason Jar; the room that replaced it was named America's best small venue. The Rebel Lounge at 2303 East Indian School Road in Phoenix opened on May 20, 2015, when promoter Stephen "Psyko Steve" Chilton and partner Chuckie Duff bought the fabled rock bar's building and rebuilt it from the studs. The predecessor's legend loomed over the project: the Mason Jar ran from 1979 to 2004 as Phoenix's infamous metal and hard rock haven, hos.....