Mac Rating: 5.00 | Votes: 1 | Date: 03/07/2026 02:30:00

Leonard Nimoy's name now lights a Westwood marquee that first glowed on Christmas Day 1940, when the UCLAN Theatre opened a block south of the campus whose initials it borrowed. The Nimoy, at 1262 Westwood Boulevard in Los Angeles, is UCLA's flexible live-performance home, reborn from the historic Crest Theatre. The building's cinema century ran through many names - UCLAN, Crest, Majestic Crest, Bigfoot Crest - and its defining feature arrived in the late 1980s, when theater designer Joseph Musil gave the Crest an Art Deco fantasy renovation with stylized murals of Hollywood and Westwood landmarks, including a 230-foot cityscape of 1930s Los Angeles. UCLA acquired the long-dormant theater in October 2018, aided by a major gift from Susan Bay Nimoy, the actor's widow, and a $24 million rehabilitation by BAR Architects converted the 440-seat movie house into a 299-capacity live room while carefully preserving Musil's murals, the marquee and the Deco fixtures. The renovation rebuilt the guts for performance: 158 fixed seats on a raked parterre, a flat pit with pneumatic risers that can host a mosh pit, cabaret tables or formal rows, a line-array sound system, LED lighting and flexible rigging, plus an enlarged lobby, bar and green room in 10,500 square feet. The venue opened to the public on September 17, 2023 with a free celebration headlined by Las Cafeteras, and its programming is curated by UCLA's Center for the Art of Performance - an inaugural season of 35 events spanning Grammy-winning poet J. Ivy, Ethiopian ensemble Ethiocolor, pipa virtuoso Wu Man and puppeteer Ronnie Burkett. The scale is the point: CAP UCLA books global artists into a room where no seat is far from the stage, giving Los Angeles a mid-size experimental venue between club and concert hall. For Westwood Village, the relit marquee returned a cultural anchor to a neighborhood that had watched its historic screens go dark one by one.