Why Largo at the Coronet matters.
Largo at the Coronet is an intimate performance venue where Beverly Grove's independent arts culture meets a postwar theater shaped by experimental drama, songwriter residencies and Los Angeles alternative comedy.
Set along North La Cienega Boulevard near Oakwood Avenue and just north of Beverly Boulevard, the venue occupies a two-story entertainment complex embedded within a corridor long associated with galleries, restaurants and performance spaces. Lyle Nelson Barcume designed the building with Streamline Moderne architecture and Late Moderne elements, organizing the corner property around a theater volume, street-facing commercial spaces and an interior courtyard. The main room retains a genuine proscenium stage measuring 39 feet across, with seating directed squarely toward the performance area and a scale substantially more intimate than a conventional concert hall. A brick-paved courtyard precedes the auditorium, and the smaller Little Room occupies another part of the complex, preserving the building's original arrangement of multiple creative spaces around a shared site. The result is a compact theatrical compound whose courtyard, proscenium, close seating and layered postwar architecture support the concentrated artist-audience relationship central to Largo's character.
What defines Largo at the Coronet.
Largo at the Coronet is best known for joining Mark Flanagan's influential music-and-comedy club with a Coronet Theatre whose creative history began decades before Largo arrived. Russian vaudeville dancer and entrepreneur Frieda Berkoff Gellis pursued the complex as early as 1942 and commissioned Barcume to design a building containing a 272-seat stage theater, Little Theatre, cinema, storefronts and second-floor dance studio. John Houseman's Pelican Productions became an early theatrical force there, presenting Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth with Jane Wyatt and Keenan Wynn in June 1947, followed in July by the world premiere of Bertolt Brecht's Galileo starring Charles Laughton. Jean-Paul Sartre's No Exit followed in August, giving the new theater three consequential productions during its first season. The complex soon developed creative lives outside its main stage: its cinema became associated with experimental film, and the upstairs studio hosted dance activity involving performers including Mitzi Gaynor, Nancy Sinatra, Betty Grable, Lucille Ball and Ann-Margret. Doug Weston operated the original Troubadour from the Little Theatre between 1957 and 1961, placing the folk club inside the Coronet years before its better-known move to Santa Monica Boulevard. Deborah Del Prete and Gigi Pritzker acquired the property in 1996, and the former dance studio became Upstairs at the Coronet in 1999 as another performance room. Los Angeles designated the Coronet Theatre Building a Historic-Cultural Monument in December 2023, formally recognizing a creative history stretching from postwar theater through experimental cinema, dance, folk music and contemporary performance.
Flanagan's Largo developed its own artistic lineage before the Coronet became its home. Flanagan entered the Fairfax Avenue club with partners in 1993, returned after an early departure and assumed sole control in 1996, reshaping the room around concentrated listening and substantial freedom for performers. Multi-instrumentalist Jon Brion became the central musical figure through a Friday residency begun in 1996, constructing unscripted sets across piano, guitar, drums and less conventional instruments as musicians including Fiona Apple, Aimee Mann and Michael Penn entered Largo's orbit. Comedy grew beside that songwriter culture, with performers including Paul F. Tompkins, Sarah Silverman, Patton Oswalt and Zach Galifianakis helping turn Largo into a meeting ground for two creative communities. Years before relocation, Flanagan, Brion and filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson had begun searching for a larger theater, and news that the Coronet faced demolition led Flanagan to negotiate a 15-year lease in 2008. Aimee Mann inaugurated Largo's La Cienega chapter on June 2, 2008 with Tompkins and Brion joining her during the evening, followed three days later by Randy Newman. Another unexpected chapter arrived in July 2020 when Conan shifted production into the Coronet during pandemic restrictions; Conan O'Brien continued filming there through the series finale in June 2021. Largo's history links Flanagan's artist-centered Fairfax club with a theater already carrying six decades of Los Angeles performance history when the two institutions joined.
How Largo at the Coronet fits.
Largo at the Coronet works as the anchor for an arts-focused outing connecting Southern California modernism, Los Angeles craft culture and the architectural preservation of Hollywood's film history.
Begin at Schindler House, completed in 1922 for architect Rudolph M. Schindler, his wife Pauline and their friends Clyde and Marian Chace as a dramatic cooperative live-work dwelling. Schindler organized the house around a four-foot module and developed its walls through an experimental slab-tilt method in which tapered concrete panels were poured horizontally and raised into position, leaving narrow glass slots between massive planes. Individual rooms open directly onto garden courts, dissolving conventional separations between domestic interiors and outdoor living. The house became the headquarters of the MAK Center for Art and Architecture in 1994, extending the Schindlers' association with artists, architects, writers and cultural experimentation into a contemporary institution. Continue to Craft Contemporary, whose origins reach to painter Edith Robinson Wyle's The Egg and the Eye, opened in 1965 inside Gilbert Stanley Underwood's 1930 neo-Georgian building on Wilshire Boulevard. Wyle paired a gallery with a restaurant and developed exhibitions around handmade objects from numerous cultural traditions; the first presentation included Native Alaskan sculpture, work by J. B. Blunk and pieces by Beatrice Wood and Harrison McIntosh. The organization became the nonprofit Craft & Folk Art Museum in 1973, launched its Festival of Masks in 1976 and reopened after a Hodgetts + Fung renovation in 1995. Its present Craft Contemporary name arrived in 2018, extending more than five decades of institutional attention to making and design. Conclude at Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, where Renzo Piano Building Workshop joined the restored 1939 May Company department store with a new 45,000-square-foot glass-and-concrete sphere. Albert C. Martin and Samuel A. Marx designed the original Streamline Moderne department store as an automobile-oriented anchor for the developing Miracle Mile, crowned by its cylindrical gold corner tower. Piano's project converted the 250,000-square-foot historic building into the Saban Building and connected it by glass bridges to the sphere containing the David Geffen Theater and Dolby Family Terrace, creating a purpose-built home for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' film museum. The progression moves from Schindler's experimental domestic architecture through Wyle's institution devoted to craft and culminates in Piano's union of preserved department-store architecture with a major museum for cinema, tracing three distinct forms of Los Angeles creative institution-building around Largo's performance culture.
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