The Smith Center for the Performing Arts opened on March 10, 2012, with a gala concert event filmed for broadcast on PBS, hosted by Neil Patrick Harris with performances by luminaries including Willie Nelson, Merle Haggard, Mavis Staples, Carole King, Arturo Sandoval and John Fogerty. Jennifer Hudson concluded the historic evening by singing “Take Care of This House” from the musical production 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

“And she said, ‘Now that the Smith Center is open, I take this song written for the White House and I apply it to your house, and I ask you all, starting tonight, to take care of this house,’” recalls Myron Martin, Smith Center president and CEO. “Ten years later, maybe my greatest sense of pride along with how people have adopted and nurtured the Smith Center, is how our team has taken such great care of the facility.”

The immaculate building in Downtown’s Symphony Park looks just as great as it did on opening night. Exactly 10 years later, it will host another epic performance, which will be filmed for a future PBS special, when the legendary Paul Anka takes the stage at Reynolds Hall as part of his Anka Sings Sinatra tour.

Even for an iconic pop artist who has been headlining in Las Vegas since the 1950s and touring the globe performing in various venues for decades, the Smith Center stands out as a special place he always looks forward to visiting.

“It’s one of the best theaters in the world,” Anka says. “For me and the people I know there who have been there for years, it’s a wonderful asset, and it’s a big part of living that other life in Las Vegas that most people outside of the town have no idea exists.

“Technically, esthetically, acoustically, it’s fantastic for us, and such an easy place to be,” Anka continues. “But for those [locals] who don’t go to the Strip, it’s an amazing thing to have. I’ve been in and out of town forever, and I’ll play the Strip, and I’m talking about a new residency, but I’ll never stop playing the Smith Center.”

Ten years is a long time in Las Vegas. Some will surely feel surprised the Smith Center has been around for only a decade; to many in this community, it’s a bedrock institution that seems to have existed far longer.

The idea behind the facility—and the genesis of the nonprofit organization that operates it—stretch back to the early 1990s, when a group of community leaders, including current Chairman of the Board Don Snyder and Vice Chairman Dr. Keith Boman, started the discussion to establish what it would take to create a world-class performing arts center in the entertainment capital of the world, which had been the largest community in North America without one.

“Back then, this group was talking about the next steps, an academic medical center and pro sports teams, and this was the third part of that trifecta,” says Martin, who originally came from New York City to manage the Liberace Foundation and got involved with Smith Center efforts in the late ’90s. “I volunteered to help this group understand what a performing arts center was and what it would bring to the community, how it would make this a better place to live.”

The effort found substantial support from gaming industry executives, who’d struggled at times to attract top national business talent to Las Vegas. The city’s flashy reputation didn’t leave a lot of space for a balance of cultural experiences.

That same reputation fueled some resistance to facility’s early development. “There was lots of pushback early on,” Martin says. “If it’s the entertainment capital, why did we need another showroom? Those were their terms. We had to make the case that we weren’t building another showroom but a theater and performance space to celebrate arts and culture and entertainment from around the world, and it was hard early on.”

But as this quirky desert city has time and again, Las Vegas found a way to get it done. The Donald W. Reynolds Foundation chipped in first with $50 million, then the Las Vegas City Council granted a 5.5-acre plot for the center, along with infrastructure and environmental assistance. The project team scored a major win by lobbying the state and Clark County to approve a new car rental tax to help fund the facility in 2005, and the Reynolds Foundation followed up with one of the largest arts donations in U.S. history—$100 million—in 2008.

The Smith Center was also instrumental in re-energizing Downtown Las Vegas at a pivotal time. Opening less than a month after the Mob Museum on Third Street near City Hall, the new cultural hub became the anchor of Symphony Park—where the Cleveland Clinic Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health arrived in 2010—and the Smith Center enabled the Discovery Children’s Museum to move in next door and expand its offerings in 2013.

“If you go really far back, there were two groups of people saying they wanted to build a performing arts center in Las Vegas, and one group thought they should build a beautiful temple to the arts in Summerlin,” Martin says. “This group believed it needed to be in the heart of Downtown, where it would be easily accessible to everybody in the Valley.

“It was [former Las Vegas] Mayor Jan Jones who realized the importance of this being part of the city’s infrastructure, and then ironically the head of [Summerlin developer] the Howard Hughes Corporation … who weighed in and said he thought the best place … would be Downtown Las Vegas.”

The past decade has seen the Smith Center accomplish its ambitious goals of bringing arts events that wouldn’t otherwise be presented to local audiences and lifting up its resident companies—the Las Vegas Philharmonic symphony orchestra and the Nevada Ballet Theatre—by providing a first-class theater headquarters in Reynolds Hall.

It has hosted countless performances in its smaller venues, Myron’s (formerly known as Cabaret Jazz) and the Troesh Studio Theater, while bringing in top Broadway productions on a regular basis. The recently announced 2022-2023 Broadway Series might be the biggest yet, featuring Hamilton, Hadestown, Annie, Jagged Little Pill, Mean Girls, Moulin Rouge and Disney’s Frozen.

The Smith Center has produced its own original musical Idaho!, launched the national tours of hit productions like Kinky Boots and An Officer and a Gentleman and presented hundreds of concert performances from favorite Las Vegas musicians and big-name touring stars. But its impact on the community over its first decade is equally defined by its educational programming, which takes place on and offstage.

Housed in the Elaine Wynn Studio for Arts Education in the Boman Pavilion, the Education and Outreach Department has been engineering arts experiences for students, educators and other community members even longer than the Smith Center has been open. Vice President of Education and Outreach Candy Schneider, a Nevadan since she was 6 months old who worked for the Clark County School District for 33 years, joined the Smith Center team in the fall of 2006.

“It was a dream, and then it came into reality,” she says, recalling the opening of the facility. “What an opportunity and a jewel it is for our community. And the education component has always been critical, because if we were indeed building this for the future of our community, we needed to speak directly to the future of our community. So starting programming prior to even breaking ground was really important.”

When it was a foundation and not yet a place with a name, the Smith Center began hosting performances in borrowed spaces and visiting local classrooms as an affiliate of the Southern Nevada Wolf Trap program. Initial outreach evolved into expanded programming in schools and taking visiting and resident artists to perform for student groups, artist residencies in classrooms, outreach to museums and community organizations like Child Haven and St. Jude’s Ranch and student trips to the Smith Center for matinee performances along with master classes held on site.

It only takes one exposure to inspire forever, that first time a student visits and experiences an artistic performance. “It was the vision of our leadership and board to have that understanding and make this idea an important component of this organization,” Schneider says. “It’s a beautiful building, but a building is not an organization. The heart and soul is the commitment this community has made to ensure everyone has the opportunity to experience arts in this way.”

Educational programming had grown each year until the pandemic arrived, and while the Smith Center reopened for performances in September after a long struggle during the shutdown, Schneider’s department is patiently waiting to relaunch. “Once everybody is comfortable and restrictions have been eased to our comfort level, we want to get to the level of programming we were doing, and bring some new programs on down the line,” she says. Virtual educational experiences launched during COVID will continue in some form, too.

The state mask mandate lifted in February, but the Smith Center’s guest-facing staff remains masked during performances. Guests are no longer required to show proof of vaccination to see a show, but things aren’t yet back to normal. A touring Broadway production of My Fair Lady had to cancel several performances in Orange County because of positive test results among the cast and crew weeks before the show hit the Smith Center in January.

“We’re always on edge and on alert for things like that,” Martin says. “Travel isn’t as easy as it used to be, and we had the occasion where someone intended to fly here for a concert and a flight was canceled. We’re not back to normal, for sure, but the level of enthusiasm from our audiences has been extraordinary. People are so happy to come back to the Smith Center, as if they knew they missed it but didn’t know how much.”

Though the pandemic has been an unfortunately part of the Smith Center’s first decade, it might have also bolstered the sense of community pride that sparked its creation in the first place—and fueled its unquestionable success. Going without it for a year and a half has allowed this community to reflect on its true impact.

“I have heard people say, when they’ve come back, that it feels like the Smith Center has been open forever,” Martin says, “because they don’t remember a time when they weren’t coming here.”

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