Crawford takes sideline to pitch-perfect arts center opening
By CHRIS PAGE
Get Out

Perhaps the point won't hit home until later.
Certainly not for those of us who were overwhelmingly charmed and dazzled by "Phantom of the Opera" star Michael Crawford at the Mesa Arts Center's inaugural performance Saturday night.

No, that Crawford delivered a pitch-perfect concert was almost perfunctory for the consummate showman.
Here's the larger revelation: This crazy idea - the one about plunking down a $98 million arts center in the heart of downtown Mesa and expecting it to not only reinvigorate the city's fizzled reputation but change the landscape
of arts in the Valley - well, it just might work.

Administrators of the city-run arts center have long hyped a kind of magical synergy between its four lobby-connected theaters (as well as with its arts classes and below-ground art museum). It's a dreamy ideal of patrons coming for one show but being seduced, by some other sideline treasure, into lingering longer. Saturday night, well before Crawford took the stage, that dream came to life.

ECLECTIC EXCESS
It happened in the MAC's smaller theaters, like the 200-seat Nesbitt/Elliott Playhouse, where a small and feisty Cuban band, Mundo Latino's Havanaché, played cha-cha music as ballroom dancers performed, and in the 99-seat Farnsworth Studio, which was made over into a dimly-lighted, intimate nightclub for jazz organist Joey DeFrancesco's mellow drums-and-organ duo.

And shortly before 10 p.m., as an ovation-happy audience was sent swooning out of Crawford's performance in the 1,600-seat Ikeda Theater only to be met by Havanaché playing in the courtyard just outside, tempting people to stop
and take in a little more magic before driving home.

"It's the little things, great little touches, that really count," said Debbie Duncan, a Tempe resident who - no offense to friends there - thinks the MAC humbles the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Gammage Auditorium in her town.

In an evening reserved for Mesa pooh-bahs, media rubbernecks, die-hard Crawford fans and curious Valley arts patrons with some $125 to $285 to spare per ticket (a free public opening for the city-funded center follows next weekend) the theme seemed to be all about defying Mesa's existing reputation with an overload of exotic eclectica.

A pre-concert reception in the 550-seat Piper Repertory Theater featured MAC-themed ice sculptures, mountains of seafood, free-flowing champagne and, of all things, a sushi bar ("Why not sushi?" Duncan said. "I mean, I hate
sushi, but it's time for Mesa to grow up."), while outside in the lobby tables of cheeses and desserts were mauled by patrons while a globe-spanning sprinkling of musicians around the campus (from Asian folk to Spanish guitars played by white guys) provided a world-music serenade.

Opening the Crawford concert, television personality Hugh Downs took the helm for a speech and video presentation that not-too-subtly praised the MAC as a linchpin for downtown revitalization. (The underlying jab: The rest of Mesa has to play catch-up.)

Randy Vogel, administrator of the MAC's theaters, schmoozed crowds with a beaming grin and bold declaratives.

"Anyone can say what they want about what Mesa was," he said. "This is what Mesa is."

WHAT ABOUT CRAWFORD?
For some at Saturday night's inauguration, including the some 200 members of the Michael Crawford International Fan Association who came to the concert from across the globe, the spotlight wasn't on the MAC so much as
its headliner, a Broadway icon who performed favorite showtunes both from shows he made famous (like "The Phantom of the Opera") and those in which he never starred.

It was a typical champion performance by Crawford, 63, who told gossipy stories about some of his starring roles in between songs like his "Phantom" hits - duetting with onetime "Phantom" costar Dale Kristien - and other
musical classics such as "Les Miserables," backed by a gorgeous full symphony and choir.

The banter (all the way down to calling the center "brand-spanking new") and set list mirrored exactly his concert last week at the new Ferguson Center for the Arts in Newport News, Va., and was similar to concerts he's performed in years past.

He began the show playing Jesus ("Gethsemane," from "Jesus Christ Superstar") and ended it as Barbra Streisand ("A Piece of Sky," from the "Yentl" soundtrack; his second Streisand number of the night).

Crawford sang with emotional gusto throughout the performance, from taking over the conductor's baton during a playful "Before the Parade Passes By" (the other Streisand number, from "Hello, Dolly!") to dramatically stalking Kristien during their gorgeous "Phantom" duet.

"I think he was in top form," said Lindsay Holbrook, 21, a Chico, Calif., native and Crawford fan club member who last saw him in concert in 2001. "He was absolutely amazing."

Though Crawford's stellar performance was no surprise, the show was a prime test of the Ikeda Theater's acoustics, which with a nearly full audience - and an unruly gathering of symphonic orchestra, chorus and two leading vocalists needing to be blended together - proved lively, bright and responsive, much like Los Angeles' new and critically acclaimed Walt Disney Symphony Hall, another wood-heavy and contemporary-sleek venue.

Unfortunately, though, the Crawford concert proved a bit too loudly amplified to fully appreciate the theater's natural acoustics. That will have to come later.

THE MORNING AFTER
So the Mesa Arts Center pulled off a boffo opening. What's left in the wake?

A full season in which administrators will have to keep that same magic, that same synergistic spirit, alive. A year to prove that a night of sushi and champagne and song wasn't one big blowout before a string of middling fizzle. Saturday night, the bar was set - higher, perhaps, than many of us expected.

If anything, Saturday means that the MAC, along with the city supporting it, will have to work harder to prove itself, to make a crazy idea - an arts utopia in downtown Mesa - work.

MICHAEL CRAWFORD SONG LIST
"Gethsemane"
"Bring Him Home"
"Before the Parade Passes By" "The Impossible Dream"
"Phantom of the Opera" (instrumental)
"Think of Me" (solo by Dale Kristien)
"Phantom of the Opera" (duet with Kristien)
"All I Ask of You" (duet with Kristien)
"The Music of the Night"
"Not Too Far from Here"
"On Eagle's Wings"
"A Piece of Sky" ("Papa, Can You Hear Me?")