New West Live

The Columbia opened in 1927 as a vaudeville house, and for most of a century it did what rooms like it do — filled up, emptied out, changed hands, and waited. The plaster detail above the proscenium is original. Almost nothing behind it is.

We reopened it as a comedy club because the shape of the room was already right: wide enough for two hundred and ninety people, shallow enough that nobody sits far from the microphone. Everything we have done since has been in service of that.