NM08 - Performing Arts — All the State's a Stage

When the sun sets and the stars come out at the Santa Fe Opera, it’s hard to tell which is more enchanting: the stunning high desert setting or the world-famous performers. With an open-ended backstage that allows patrons to gaze toward the Sangre de Cristo mountain range, the architecturally acclaimed theater is home to a festival-style summer season that attracts opera aficionados from around the globe.

Only 30 miles away, casually clad theatergoers cheer, boo, and toss marshmallows at villains of a different ilk. Victorian and Western melodramas take to the stage of the Engine House Theater in Madrid along N.M. 14, the Turquoise Trail. Located in a renovated locomotive repair shop, the old theater allows the vocal audience to sit only feet away as virtue and villainy duel it out in this old coal-mining ghost town turned artist retreat. Melodramas are also the specialty at the Opera House in the historical gold mining town of Pinos Altos, only six miles north of Silver City, in southern New Mexico.

Whether you prefer dancing on a summer night to a live jazz band at Albuquerque Museum’s outdoor sculpture garden, or catching an off-Broadway production at Alto’s $22 million Spencer Theater for the Performing Arts, the choices are vast and all entertaining.

Reflecting the state’s history, many of the theatrical or musical hot spots come with tales of their own. The Old San Ysidro Church in Corrales, with 3-foot-thick adobe walls dating to the 1860s, is the historical backdrop for the Music in Corrales series encompassing productions from a classical violinist to a beloved local jug band. Community theater rules at the Albuquerque Little Theatre in a building designed by famed Southwestern architect John Gaw Meem. The structure along historic Route 66 was the first in Albuquerque to be built by the Works Progress Administration in 1936 as part of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.

Old movie houses have also found second lives as performing arts centers. Santa Fe’s Lensic Performing Arts Center, once a film and vaudeville house that attracted the likes of Judy Garland and Roy Rogers, has been renovated visually and acoustically to reflect its pseudo-Moorish, Spanish Renaissance origins. In Albuquerque, the landmark KiMo Theatre along old Route 66 through Downtown is a restored gem of Pueblo Deco style from the 1920s. The KiMo boasts decorative motifs from indigenous cultures, including terra cotta shields and glowing red eyes peering from a line of cow skulls. The theater also claims a ghost of a 6-year-old boy killed when a water heater exploded in the lobby in 1951. To this day performers leave doughnuts for the young ghost to ensure they have a trouble-free evening. Art and independent films are the specialty of the Fountain Theatre in Old Mesilla, built in 1905 and considered the oldest movie house in New Mexico in use. Roswell’s Community Little Theater is also housed in a renovated cinema, as is Alamogordo’s Flickinger Center.

Some performing arts venues are state-of-the-art when it comes to seating and acoustics. Popejoy Hall, on the University of New Mexico campus, hosts traveling Broadway productions, Shakespearean dramas, and acclaimed dance companies throughout the year. Also in Albuquerque is the National Hispanic Cultural Center’s award-winning Roy E. Disney Theater for the Performing Arts that soars skyward like a modern Mayan pyramid to showcase Latino and other music and dance performances, including the New Mexico Symphony. The $22 million Spencer Theater in Alto near Ruidoso, designed by famed architect Antoine Predock, is a world-class facility built by Dow Jones heiress Jackie Spencer and her husband. The theater’s collection of colorful, variegated glass sculptures by Dale Chihuly, often called the “Tiffany of the 21st century,” is the largest in the Southwest.

The northern mountain communities of Angel Fire, Taos, Raton, and Las Vegas offer intimate settings in local community centers, theaters, auditoriums, and a parish hall for the concerts of Music from Angel Fire, an extraordinary chamber music festival the last two weeks of August.

Numerous outdoor venues take advantage of the abundant sunshine and lingering warm seasons. Summer evenings in Albuquerque are hopping with city-sponsored concerts at the Rio Grande Zoo, the Rio Grande Botanic Garden, the Albuquerque Museum, and the Summerfest series in Civic Plaza downtown. Also outdoors, the Journal Pavilion south of Albuquerque brings in national and international rock ’n’ roll and country music stars, as do many of the casino amphitheaters operated by pueblos.

Big multipurpose venues including the Macey Center at Socorro, the Pan American Center at Las Cruces and Rio Rancho’s brand new Santa Ana Star Center have seen everyone from Al Gore to the Rolling Stones. Smaller community productions or traveling acts can find audiences at Albuquerque’s Outpost Performance Space, Vortex Theater, or the Adobe Theater. Santa Fe offers venues such as the Santa Fe Playhouse near the state capitol building.

New Mexico’s diverse performing arts venues extend a hearty welcome to barbershop choruses and thrilling flamenco dancers, symphony orchestras and world-renowned opera. Whatever your artistic taste, there’s a show for you.

Jane Mahoney is an Albuquerque-based writer who always appreciates a good show