Cactus Theatre

Joe Vogel on April 8, 2022 at 4:48 pm

1727 Larimer Street was the address of a house that was first listed in the FDY in 1930 as the Zaza Theatre. If it had an earlier name I haven’t found it. In 1942 it was renamed the Kiva Theatre. It was still listed as the Kiva in the 1947 FDY but by 1949 had become the Cactus. That name change most likely took place in 1947, though, as the Cactus is mentioned in the January 31, 1948 issue of Boxoffice as having been recently sold.

I was going to add the Zaza (which is sometimes styled ZaZa) several years ago but lost track of it. It is actually quite a famous theater, not for its own sake but because it was one of the childhood haunts of beat generation icon Neal Cassady, whose father worked in the ZaZa barber shop next door to the theater in the 1930s. Cassady mentions the theater several times in his autobiographical book The First Third. He also mentions the name change to Kiva Theatre in 1942, and is the source for the Zaza’s address being 1727 Larimer.