Tomorrow Night, the Marquee Trades Metal for Island Soul

The Marquee Theatre's August is going to get loud — DevilDriver and a full metal onslaught are coming later this month — but the room opens its heavy season with something almost defiantly gentle. On Tuesday, Aug. 4, Hawaiian singer Josh Tatofi brings his Looking for Love Tour to Tempe, and it may be the most counterintuitive booking of the summer: a velvet-voiced contemporary-island crooner headlining a 1,500-cap rock barn on a Tuesday, in the dead center of a Sonoran heat wave.

Tatofi has been dubbed, not unreasonably, the "Polynesian Luther Vandross" — a comparison that tells you everything about the register he's working in. His sound is contemporary Hawaiian music threaded with straight R&B: slow, warm, built for swaying rather than moshing. In a month the Marquee will otherwise spend hosting funk parties, a Tom Petty tribute and a metalcore bill, Tatofi is the outlier, and outliers are usually where the interesting nights hide.

There's a logic to it that goes beyond programming variety. Arizona has a large and deeply engaged Pacific Islander community, and touring island-soul acts routinely draw devoted, multigenerational crowds here — the kind of audience that arrives dressed up, sings every word, and treats the show as a family event rather than a night out. That crowd rarely gets a Marquee-sized room to itself. Tuesday, it does.

It also fits the season's iron law: in August in Tempe, the venue's single greatest amenity is its air conditioning, and the smartest programming leans into it. You are not going to a lawn. You are not standing in a courtyard. You are walking into a cold, dark, 1,500-capacity box just north of the Mill Avenue Bridge to hear a man with a four-octave-adjacent instrument sing love songs while the parking lot outside stays hot enough to fry breakfast. The contrast is the whole appeal.

For the Marquee, dates like this are quietly important. A room that survives on national touring can't afford to be a monoculture, and a mid-week island-soul show broadens the audience base in a way that a straight rock calendar never will. It's the same instinct that has the venue booking a "House of Funk" night, a Tom Petty tribute and a 2000s throwback party in the same thirty-day stretch — cast wide, keep the doors open, let the summer pay for itself.

If you're a Mill Ave lifer whose idea of a Marquee show involves ear protection, consider this your invitation to be pleasantly wrong-footed. Tatofi's material rewards the kind of attentive, sober-ish listening that a metal crowd would never sit still for. Get there early, resist the urge to talk through the ballads, and let a Tuesday night in August be something other than a fight against the heat.

Then rest up. The Marquee's month gets a great deal heavier from here — but it started soft, and on purpose.

Sources: Turn it up. These are August's hottest concerts in Phoenix — Phoenix New Times; Every Marquee Theatre concert announced for 2026 (so far) — Phoenix New Times