Sixty Years After It Went Dark, the Old Playhouse Is Running Palm Beach's Social Calendar Again

Ask a longtime resident where the island gathers and most will still say Worth Avenue, the way people answer questions out of habit rather than current fact. For most of the last century that answer was correct. It stopped being the only one in January.

Three blocks north, at 70 Royal Poinciana Way, the building that sat dark for two decades reopened with a theater, a restaurant on the water, and a jewelry house that hadn't kept a permanent address on the island since 1924. A first season can be explained away as novelty. A second season, now taking shape for this fall and winter, is the part that tells you whether a place has actually become something or just had a good opening night.

The building everyone drove past for twenty years

The Royal Poinciana Playhouse opened on February 3, 1958, designed by architect John L. Volk on land that had been Henry Flagler's Royal Poinciana Hotel before it was torn down in 1935. For decades it was the place. Bob Hope played there. So did Jackie Gleason, Bing Crosby, Helen Hayes, Dame Judith Anderson and Christopher Plummer. The Kennedys showed up. So did European royalty. Season tickets sold out on a regular basis, and opening nights ran on a red carpet.

Competition from the Kravis Center in the early 1990s ate into that audience, and the theater closed in 2004. It sat empty until WS Development tore down most of the original structure in 2023 and began building something new inside the same Volk-designed shell. The plan slipped by roughly a year from its original schedule. It finally opened this past January as Glazer Hall, backed by a donation from longtime Palm Beach residents Jill and Avie Glazer that exceeded $15 million, part of a project reported to run near $30 million overall.

What actually landed there in the same twelve months

The Playhouse site didn't get one new tenant this year. It got four, arriving close enough together that the plaza now reads as a single destination rather than a collection of separate openings.

Tutto Mare comes from the Tutto il Giorno group, founded in 2008 by Gianpaolo de Felice and Gabby Karan de Felice along with partners Gally and David Mayer, with existing locations in East Hampton, Southampton and Sag Harbor. The Palm Beach dining room was designed by Gabby Karan de Felice with Bonetti Kozerski Architecture, with Spina O'Rourke serving as architect of record, and it sits directly on Lake Worth Lagoon with a terrace overlooking Palm Harbor Marina. Glazer Hall, meanwhile, took the original 800-seat Playhouse configuration down to a 400-seat theater spread across roughly 24,000 square feet, with a glass back wall that opens onto the Intracoastal.

"This is the first theater and nonprofit cultural arts center in Palm Beach in 60 years," Jill Glazer, co-founder and president of Glazer Hall, told a reporter as construction neared completion.

Why the second season matters more than the first

A theater can sell out its opening month on curiosity alone. What it books for its second season, once the ribbon-cutting coverage has faded and the audience has to choose to come back, is the more honest signal.

Glazer Hall's first season leaned on names built for launch-night headlines: Corinne Bailey Rae, Broadway's Matthew Morrison, Academy Award winner Chazz Palminteri performing A Bronx Tale, American Ballet Theatre, and the Preservation Hall Jazz Band. The 2026-27 season, now being announced for this fall and winter, reads less like a debut and more like a venue settling into a real programming rhythm across five distinct series:

• Dance: Miami City Ballet, American Ballet Theatre, New York City Ballet
• Classical: pianist Emanuel Ax, the New York Philharmonic, tenor James Valenti
• Speakers: René Silvin, the cast of Twin Peaks, Garrison Keillor, Hugo Vickers
• Family: a Rock and Roll Playhouse tribute set, the return of the Shanghai Acrobats, Cirque Musica Holiday Wonderland
• Film: a 50th-anniversary screening of Rocky with a live orchestra performing Bill Conti's original score

Comedy nights with John Mulaney and with Colin Mochrie and Brad Sherwood, plus a jazz evening with bassist Christian McBride and a concert from Rufus Wainwright, round out a calendar that no longer needs a grand opening to justify itself. Building a second season this deep, this fast, is not what a novelty venue does. It's what a venue does when the first season proved there was a real audience waiting.

The rest of the walk is changing too

None of this is happening in isolation. A few doors down, the Church Mouse, the island's well-known thrift shop, is adding a grab-and-go coffee counter serving Pumphouse Coffee Roasters, with proceeds supporting the charitable outreach programs of the Church of Bethesda-by-the-Sea. It's a small addition, but it says something that even the island's charity resale shop is adding a reason to linger rather than just shop and leave.

Worth Avenue hasn't gone quiet either. This past summer the Worth Avenue Association ran its Wednesdays on Worth promotion from July 15 through August 12, pairing mid-week shopping discounts with a raffle for Kravis Center theater tickets, a reminder that the Avenue's merchants are still actively competing for foot traffic rather than resting on a century of reputation. And the Society of the Four Arts, founded in 1936 and still running its programs across a ten-acre Intracoastal campus of galleries, gardens and two libraries, continues to fill its own calendar with speakers, concerts and exhibitions each season, independent of anything happening at Royal Poinciana Way.

What's different is that residents now have a real choice on any given evening between the Four Arts' long-standing programming, Worth Avenue's retail and dining, and a third address that didn't exist as a going concern eighteen months ago. That's not a subtraction from the island's older institutions. It's an addition that changes how a night out actually gets planned.

What this means if you've been on autopilot

If your mental map of the island still ends at Worth Avenue and the Four Arts, it's worth an update. The building at 70 Royal Poinciana Way spent twenty years as something you drove past on the way to somewhere else. This fall, with a second season of programming that leans on depth rather than novelty, and a plaza that now includes Cartier, Bottega Veneta and the island's only true waterfront dining room, it's become somewhere you're driving to.

If you're weighing a move to the island, or already own here and are curious what a home near this stretch of Royal Poinciana Way is worth given how much has changed around it, the team at Lighthouse Realty Group knows this market block by block. Reach out to schedule a free consultation, or browse our Palm Beach neighborhood guide to see what else has shifted on the island this year.