Cecil B. DeMille commissioned the plans, Cary Grant tried to buy the building, and Al Jolson broadcast from its stage - the theatre outlasted them all. The Ricardo Montalban Theatre at 1615 Vine Street, steps from Hollywood and Vine, opened on 19 January 1927 as the Wilkes Vine Street Theatre - the first Broadway-style legitimate playhouse in Hollywood - with an adaptation of Dreiser's An American Tragedy. The Beaux-Arts building by Myron Hunt and H.C. Chambers, originally seating 1,200, cycled through Hollywood's eras under seven names: the Mirror under Howard Hughes's direction in the early 1930s, CBS Radio Playhouse from 1936 to 1954 - home of the Al Jolson Show - then the Huntington Hartford Theatre when the A&P heir refurbished it for the stage. Hartford sold in 1964 to Greek Theatre operator James Doolittle - outbidding Cary Grant - and the Doolittle Theatre era ran two decades of major productions before UCLA took the building on in the mid-1980s. The Ricardo Montalban Foundation bought the theatre in 1999 as a home for Nosotros, the advocacy organization Montalban co-founded to advance Latinos in entertainment, reopening it in May 2004 with the exterior restored toward its 1927 appearance - the first major American theatre named for a Latino artist. Today the 962-seat house hosts concerts, comedy, film premieres, theatre and community programming, while the rooftop has become an attraction in its own right: open-air cinema screenings with the projection thrown against the fly tower, launched in 2015 and now a Hollywood summer institution. The Vine Street address keeps the building at the centre of the Walk of Fame tourist corridor, one block south of the Capitol Records tower and directly on the Hollywood/Vine Metro station. The stage itself keeps working dimensions - a proscenium roughly 40 feet wide with full fly capability - which lets the house move between concert rig, play and premiere screening without structural compromise.

Type: Theater / Concert Hall

Address: 1615 Vine Street, Los Angeles, CA, United States, 90028

Telephone: 323-871-2420

Website: https://www.themontalban.com

Cover Charge: 1

Capacity: 962

Opening Date: 19/01/1927

Outdoor Area