City: Des Moines, IA

Category: Shopping

Telephone: (515) 246-2300

Address: 221 Walnut St.

Description: In addition to its in-house theater company, StageWest, the downtown Civic Center presents an annual season of numerous theater productions, as well as music, dance, and other shows—it has begun running dance shows featuring internationally renowned companies of ballet and modern dance, including the Martha Graham Dance Company. The theater shows are generally a mixture of touring plays and musicals, pop music acts and family-friendly shows, like children’s theater and music productions. Shows take place on one of three stages—make sure you know in which space your performance is located! At the Civic Center building, a main hall seats nearly 3,000, with seating sloping steeply upward from the stage, thus giving a good view of performances from throughout the auditorium; a much smaller black box theater seats about 200. Many music shows take place at the Temple Theater, a 4,000-square-foot room that seats about 300 and has excellent acoustics, and is actually located in the Temple for Performing Arts at 1011 Locust St. Tickets for all shows are available at the Civic Center box office, as well as via telephone and online.