Bravo! Brilliant! Splendid! Well done!

Zao Theatre reopened Saturday, June 11, in its new Gold Canyon home with audience members raving about the memorable show, “It’s Just Music,” a fundraiser for the Centerstage Church/Zao Theatre Brick By Brick Capital Fund campaign, and the Broadway-quality talent of the performers on the stage.

In their directing debut, Rebecca Bryce and Calli Rasmussen compiled parts and pieces of some wonderful musical numbers to help audience members and actors alike walk through the nostalgia of Zao musicals for the first eight seasons and prepare them for the future of Zao Theatre on Kings Ranch Road.

We must express a heartfelt thank you to everyone who contributed to the success of this Brick By Brick fundraiser: our fabulous patrons, old and new, without whom there would be no show; dedicated actors and technical crew; and our faithful Zao volunteers.

What is Brick By Brick? It is a capital fund campaign for the sole purpose of purchasing a new permanent home for Centerstage Church/Zao Theatre. In November 2021, we had a very bleak outlook on the future of Centerstage and Zao until God led us to Kings Ranch Road. Very quickly the leadership team knew this was the location destined to become our forever home. They instituted the Brick By Brick campaign and set forth to raise the cash needed for the purchase.

To date, the Brick by Brick campaign has raised approximately 80% of the cash amount needed to purchase the property. To learn more about Brick By Brick, or contribute to the fund, please visit our website at zaotheatre.com or centerstagechurch.org, or drop by 6338 S. Kings Ranch Road any Sunday morning at 10 a.m. But don’t look for our familiar LED sign, it’s not there yet.

If you remember us from our previous location on Ironwood Drive in Apache Junction, you will remember we had a very informative LED sign that sat along the street and helped community members find our location. We don’t have that sign right now, but we are working on getting it in place. The county has different rules, so as a good neighbor, we are working our way through the process of convincing our new neighbors that our LED sign is compatible with Gold Canyon’s desire to preserve their “dark sky.”

It’s hard to relate to how much light emission is too much. The best way to describe an LED sign versus a white sign with fluorescent tubes is like watching your color television with a lamp turned that has a 150 watt bulb. When you turn the lamp off, the room goes fairly dark with just the television screen on, it doesn’t throw off much ambient light, yet you can clearly see the picture across the room. So when you come to Zao Theatre for our next show, we hope you’ll see our LED sign in place.

So what’s coming for Zao Theatre’s ninth season? Opening the 2022-23 season in August will be the dramatic play “Frost/Nixon” directed by Virginia Olivieri, and featuring Centerstage Church pastor and Zao artistic director Mickey Bryce as Richard Nixon and well known valley actor Chris Fidler as David Frost. It will be followed in October by the well known musical “Guys & Dolls” with the dramatic play “Lilies of the Field” in January and a surprise musical rounding out the season in March.

Tickets are available online through zaotheatre.com, so reserve your seats today and join us for the new season of Zao Theatre on Kings Ranch Road.