Abandoned Playboy Theater asks $6.5M in Miami Beach — a glittering home to iconic performances in its heyday

The velvet ropes are long gone. The bunnies, longer. 

But the room where Sammy Davis Jr., Ray Charles and the Supremes once stopped Miami Beach cold is back on the market. And for $6.5 million, someone’s about to get one of the most storied entertainment assets in South Florida for the price of a decent Brickell condo. 

The former Playboy Theater at 5445 Collins Ave. is officially for sale, a 26,000-square-foot relic of Miami Beach’s loudest, most unapologetic era tucked inside the Castle Beach Club tower on the Mid-Beach waterfront. It’s being pitched for a rare redevelopment play.

The price has already been cut by $1.5 million. The brokers have already been swapped. And yet the pitch remains the same: You can’t build this anymore. 

They’re right. You can’t. 

When Playboy Enterprises dropped millions into the Castle Hotel in 1970, transforming it into the Playboy Plaza Hotel and club, it wasn’t just building a nightclub — it was staking a claim on Miami Beach’s jet-set identity at the exact moment that identity was being invented. 

What followed was the kind of era that gets mythologized: packed houses, celebrity residencies, the sort of room where music, money and spectacle collided nightly and no one thought to document it because it felt like it would last forever. It didn’t. But the bones certainly did. 

The theater later reinvented itself as the Hirschfeld Theatre, pulling in Broadway touring productions — Phantom of the Opera, Evita, 42nd Street — before eventually going dark again. 

Gloria Estefan filmed her “Hotel Nacional” music video there on the way out, which is either a graceful farewell or a sign the place has more lives than anyone’s counting. 

Today the interior is stripped to the studs. The finishes are gone. The glory is gone. What remains is the curvature of the balconies, the depth of the stage and roughly 26,000 square feet of grandfathered entertainment zoning that a hospitality lawyer would describe, quietly, as irreplaceable. That’s the bet.

New York-based Top Rock Holdings has held the property since 2021.

Miami Beach has spent years tightening zoning and capacity rules that make building a large-format venue from scratch a near-impossible proposition. The city is now quietly reversing course, rolling back restrictions along the Mid-Beach corridor specifically to lure live entertainment back to the stretch of Collins Avenue that sits in the dead zone between the chaos of South Beach and the sanitized luxury of Bal Harbour. 

The timing, in other words, is not an accident. 

Supper clubs, immersive experiences, hybrid performance-and-hospitality concepts — operators chasing the post-nightclub dollar are hunting for exactly the kind of space that doesn’t exist anymore. This one does. Barely. But it does. 

“The Playboy Theater isn’t just a property — it’s a piece of Miami Beach history with a pulse,” Anne Mary Mairura of Fausto Commercial, who is co-listing the property with Tony Saladrigas, told The Post.