Smith Center ready to remake Las Vegas culture

Live from Las Vegas ... Culture.

Even as snobs and elites chuckled and snickered from long-distance perches in faraway cities, we knew we had it -- though culture here was diffuse, flung around the city and suburbs, and in a larger sense, homeless.

Finally, it has headquarters. (Fancy-schmancy, too.)

"There isn't a great city that doesn't have a strong cultural base," says Mayor Carolyn Goodman about The Smith Center for the Performing Arts. "It's equal to anything in the world. There is so much richness The Smith Center is going to bring to us. It's just huge."

Like a large stone splashing into a still pond, its effects will ripple outward toward the rest of Las Vegas:

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Perception makeover: Boldly, Smith Center President Myron Martin declares it again and again: "The message to the world is that Las Vegas has grown up."

Absolutely. One hell of a growth spurt. Call it our artistic bar mitzvah. Our cultural confirmation. Las Vegans overwhelmingly backed our own maturation back in 2003, based on a survey by national pollster Frank Luntz. Our artistic adulthood will surely polish our luster.

Whether it shifts most of the globe's stubborn take on us as a bawdy, gaudy recreation destination, as some have speculated, is debatable. Arguably, it shouldn't. Repeatedly insisting The Smith Center was constructed primarily for the community, Martin labels it the city's "living room," and that's a valuable new plus for our quality of life.

Our financial mother's milk, however, is the tourism trade that stampedes to the glitz blitz of the Strip. More or less a millennium would have to pass before we're famed for anything else. We'll always be "Vegas, baby!" to the world.

Consider also that very few performing arts centers -- out of nearly 250 of them nationwide -- are strongly associated with their home cities, with Washington, D.C.'s Kennedy Center and New York's Lincoln Center being notable exceptions. Dallas claims the AT&T Performing Arts Center, but will always be more renowned for the machinations of J.R. and the tragedy of J.F.K. Back East, Newark, N.J., might boast the New Jersey Performing Arts Center, but will ever be known more as the birthplace of Whitney Houston and the home of Tony Soprano.

The Smith Center doesn't make us something else. It does make us something more.

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Economic makeover: Las Vegas wins. Or at least improves significantly. Center officials estimate that in its inaugural year, it will inject 250 full-time employees into our workforce. Since the 2009 groundbreaking, construction produced 3,500 jobs. Culinary Arts Catering, which provides the center's concessions and catering, hosted a job fair in January to fill 200-plus positions, most for The Smith Center.

Though many other factors figure into a downtown revitalization -- especially, whether Symphony Park's promise as a catalyst for numerous development projects bears fruit -- The Smith Center will bring bodies downtown, bodies that will crave sustenance at downtown eateries and visit other downtown businesses. Safety worries are often alleviated, too, when a performing arts center bolsters a sagging downtown area with a sometimes unsavory underbelly, keeping patrons lingering around and spending money, as happened in Newark and Fort Worth, Texas.

Particularly important is the potential uplift of the arts district. Arts Factory owner Wes Myles has pointed out that the area lacks the creative mass of arts businesses necessary for a strong identity that would make it an artistic stronghold. Opening The Smith Center could fast-forward the arts district into The Arts District.

Culture-craving visitors from neighboring states such as Arizona and California will likely make the relatively easy trek here as well to see certain performers, further fattening our coffers.

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Theater makeover: Begin with the Broadway ideal. Never before have we had access to authentic, not-a-thing-left-out Broadway extravaganzas. Megahit "Wicked" (Aug. 28 to Oct. 7) heads a host of productions (including "Mary Poppins" and "The Color Purple") singing and dancing toward us. Credit The Smith Center for catapulting us onto the big boys' tour circuit.

Remember "Broadway West," though? That notion of us claiming that distinction that was all the rage among local Strip and theater prognosticators? Numerous offshoots of Big Apple bonanzas settled onto Las Vegas Boulevard, many doing healthy business ("Jersey Boys," "Chicago," "Phantom," "Mamma Mia!"). Nonetheless, even Martin -- who co-produced "Hairspray," which belly-flopped at the Luxor -- has acknowledged that we never rose to that lofty title. Truncated, 90-minute approximations do not make for genuine Broadway musicals.

Yes, that's rectified at The Smith Center. Even so, complex straight plays now on or coming to the Great White Way -- say, the current "Death of a Salesman" revival with Philip Seymour Hoffman, "Wit" with Cynthia Nixon and "The Columnist" with John Lithgow -- lend gravitas that balances Broadway.

Community theater groups cook up that nourishment for hungry local theatergoers while it's MIA on the Smith menu. Applaud the center, though, for booking several one-person shows -- Tovah Feldshuh in "Golda's Balcony," Alan Safier as George Burns in "Say Goodnight Gracie" and Lily Tomlin's show -- that do serve at least easily digestible drama and comedy.

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Artistic makeover: Caught under the wheels of The Smith Center juggernaut is the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, which has been our performing arts grande dame. Ceding marquee acts to the center, it also sacrifices the Las Vegas Philharmonic and Nevada Ballet Theatre, which hop in a U-Haul, leaving Artemus W. Ham Concert Hall behind for spectacular new digs at Smith's 2,050-seat Reynolds Hall. Each instantly gains a new level of status and, likely, attendance -- and for the Philharmonic, a superior acoustical setting as well.

Jazz receives the respect it deserves (and is often denied in this country at-large) at the center's Cabaret Jazz room, the best venue our best native music has enjoyed here since the ex-Blue Note.

Beyond the big bang of Broadway shows, The Smith Center's broad buffet of talent and programming is stunning:

Yo-Yo Ma, Branford Marsalis, David Sedaris, the Cleveland Orchestra, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Joshua Bell, Savion Glover, Barbara Cook, Andrea Marcovicci ... catch the drift?

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Education makeover: No downsides. Just ups.

There's the "Any Given Child" initiative -- teaming with the Kennedy Center -- for kindergarten-through-eighth-grade Clark County schoolchildren. Assessing curriculums and assisting school districts, it aims to bulk up arts education. There's a partnership with the Wolf Trap Foundation to enhance preschool education by training teachers to incorporate music, theater and dance into their classes.

There's the center's Elaine Wynn Studio for Arts Education. There's annual kids' field trips. There are workshops for teachers with playwrights and other creative types. There's major artists performing at the center who will stop by schools for children and college students. There's ... lots.

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Intangible makeover: Quantifying the benefits of increased arts exposure can be elusive, like nailing Jell-O to a wall -- something critics of performing arts centers often overlook -- but The Smith Center just might ...

■ Lure not just arts lovers, but break through to the previously arts-indifferent population, especially as the center is the city's hot new spot, making it a must-visit for the trend-obsessed.

■ Coax the 'burb-dwellers -- in our case, Henderson and Summerlin residents -- to the city more frequently to partake of a revived urban landscape.

■ Persuade Las Vegans transplanted here from large cities that, with an artistic amenity of this magnitude, we can offer what they were long accustomed to elsewhere and that we're worth calling home over the long haul.

■ Bridge a few class divisions, as art can do when a cultural nexus makes it appealing to all.

■ Create a monument that's built to last in the Implosion Capital of the World, assuming we've got the patience. Remember: New Yorkers might have harbored doubts too when the Metropolitan Museum of Art debuted in 1872 and Carnegie Hall swung open its doors in 1891.

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Perhaps the potential delivered by The Smith Center for the Performing Arts can be summed up in a word:

"Enrichment."

With that, the opening announcement:

Live from Las Vegas ... Culture.