The 26,000-square-foot former Playboy Theater at 5445 Collins Ave. is on the market for $6.5 million, down from $8 million when it first listed in 2025.

The three-level theater sits inside the Castle Beach condo building but is independently owned and can be operated as a standalone business, a real estate broker confirmed during a visit with Blumberg, as the Miami Herald reported. The broker also confirmed the theater can be entered from the building's main lobby. Top Rock Holding acquired the theater in 2021.

The listing drew Stuart Blumberg back to the building for the first time in 55 years. Blumberg, 89, was hired as the Hilton Plaza Hotel's first general manager before the end of 1967. He was 30 years old.

"I thought I'd died and went to heaven," Blumberg said during his August 2026 visit, as the Herald reported. "This place was paradise."

Before it became the Playboy Theater, the venue was called The Great Room. Jackie Gleason, the comedian who served as the Hilton Plaza's entertainment director, helped design it as both a theater and a studio. The room featured a split stage where each side could rise independently and a balcony.

Gleason handpicked Harry Belafonte as the first act. Belafonte performed two shows a night for a week in 1967. The original Great Room could seat about 600 people, Blumberg recalled.

The Hilton Plaza was the last hotel built from the ground up in Miami Beach until the Loews Miami Beach opened 31 years later. Gleason stayed only one year. In 1970, Playboy bought the building. It later became a Hyatt House hotel.

In 1974, Miami Beach hotelier Harold Konover bought the building and renamed it the Konover. In 1987, months before Konover died, he sold it to New York developer Abraham Hirschfeld, who renamed the building Castle Premier. Hirschfeld preserved the theater and renamed it the Hirschfeld Theater, after Broadway caricaturist Al Hirschfeld. The venue hosted productions of "Phantom of the Opera," "Evita" and "42nd Street."

The building was converted to condos in the 1990s, but the theater remained separately owned. Gloria Estefan's 2011 music video for "Hotel Nacional" was shot there.

Some original elements survive: the balcony Gleason built, arched ceilings, box seats and traces of the original blue velvet walls. The split stage is gone. Blumberg estimated that the expanded space could seat at least two to three times the original 600 people.

Blumberg, a Miami Beach High graduate who started as a bellhop at the Americana Hotel in Bal Harbour in 1956, went on to found the Greater Miami and the Beaches Hotel Association and lead it for 20 years. He was one of the founders of the Greater Miami Convention and Visitors Bureau and served 17 years in volunteer capacities after joining the initial board of the Performing Arts Center, now known as the Arsht Center, where he was designated Director Emeritus.

He suggested the theater's next life could be a community theater, art school, gallery or music video studio.

The theater remains listed for sale.