Tuacahn Amphitheatre and Center for the Arts

Tuacahn Amphitheatre is an open-air theater built into the mouth of Padre Canyon in Ivins, about twenty minutes northwest of St. George. It seats roughly 1,920 people, and the wall behind the stage is not a wall — it is some 1,500 feet of Entrada sandstone, lit after dark so that the rock itself becomes part of the show.

Where the name comes from

Tuacahn is an invented word, not an inherited one. The founders adapted it from Teotihuacan, the ancient Mesoamerican city whose name is usually rendered as the city of the gods, and reshaped it to mean canyon of the gods. It is worth knowing because the assumption runs the other way: visitors reasonably suppose the name came with the land, from the Southern Paiute people whose territory this is. It did not.

How it started

The site was eighty acres at the canyon mouth belonging to Orval Hafen, a St. George attorney and Utah state senator. In the early 1990s the playwright Douglas C. Stewart and the businessman Hyrum W. Smith, a co-founder of the Franklin Quest planner company, set out to build a theater on it. The amphitheater opened in April 1995.

It was built for one show. UTAH! opened that June, telling the story of Jacob Hamblin, the Latter-day Saint missionary Brigham Young sent south to deal with the settlements and the tribes around them. The production used pyrotechnics, live animals, and a staged flash flood, and it was rewritten repeatedly across its run before closing in 2002.

The pivot that made the place

By the end of the 1990s a single historical pageant was no longer filling 1,920 seats, and Tuacahn made the decision the rest of its identity rests on: it switched to Broadway musicals staged in rotating repertory, opening with Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.

Rotating repertory means several productions share one stage across the same weeks rather than each taking the season in turn. In a conventional theater — fly space overhead, wing storage either side — that is demanding but routine. Outdoors, with sandstone on three sides and nowhere to hoist a set, it is genuinely hard. Every set has to be modular enough to strike and re-rig between performances, sometimes overnight, which is why the scene and costume shops on site are larger than the seat count would suggest. Very few outdoor venues at this scale attempt it at all.

The programming widened from there. A 2005 staging of Beauty and the Beast began a working relationship with Disney's theatrical arm, and in 2006 the licensing house that controls Les Misérables named Tuacahn one of eight regional theaters permitted to stage it after the Broadway production closed. The calendar widened with it. Touring acts and a December production sit either side of the summer season, so the stage is in use for far more of the year than the musicals alone would fill.

The canyon is equipment, not scenery

The flash flood written into that first show left permanent infrastructure behind. A concrete riverbed runs behind the stage, fed from a holding pond, so that water can be released on cue in volumes no indoor house could contain or drain. It has since served productions that had nothing to do with pioneers — a parted sea, a storm, a river.

Live animals work the same way. Horses have been ridden onto the stage and camels have walked it in nativity scenes, which is possible here because the wings open onto open desert rather than a loading dock.

And the lighting design assumes the rock. Once it is dark, the cliffs take the light and throw it back, so a designer is working with a 1,500-foot reflector that no indoor venue can offer. The trade is that curtain has to wait for the sun, which is why start times drift through the season rather than sitting at a fixed hour.

What is actually on the site

The campus runs to about 42,000 square feet and holds more than the amphitheater:

• The open-air amphitheater, roughly 1,920 seats, which is the venue most people mean by Tuacahn
• An indoor theater of about 330 seats, named for Orval Hafen, whose land this was
• A black box theater, a dance studio, classrooms, and a recital hall
• The scene and costume shops that rotating repertory depends on

Tuacahn operates as a nonprofit rather than a commercial house, which is part of why an organization this size sits in a town of Ivins's size at all.

A high school shares the canyon

The campus is not only a producing house. A charter high school for the performing arts has occupied part of the site since the end of the 1990s, and its students work in the same studios and shops the professional productions use. The arrangement is unusual enough to be worth stating plainly: teenagers rehearse where a Broadway-scale musical loads in. It also explains why there are cars in the canyon on a weekday morning in a month when nothing is playing.

The Saturday market

Most of the year's visitors come for a show, but the canyon is also open on Saturday mornings for the Tuacahn Saturday Market, where local artists, crafters, and food vendors set up on the plaza. There is no admission charge, which makes it the straightforward way to stand in the canyon and look at the cliffs without buying a ticket to anything.

Finding it

Tuacahn is at 1100 Tuacahn Drive in Ivins, at the end of the road past Kayenta. It sits immediately against Snow Canyon State Park, and Kayenta Art Village is a few minutes back down the hill, so an evening here pairs naturally with either.

For what a performance is actually like to attend — when curtain falls relative to sunset, what the temperature does between the acts, and where to sit — see seeing a show at Tuacahn. Tuacahn is also the largest single piece of a wider performing-arts and gallery scene running from downtown St. George out to Kayenta.