On August 9, a solo performer named Jill Karlin stood on a small stage on Lake Avenue and opened a show blending spoken word, original poetry, and a painting created live in front of the audience. In three weeks, that same show travels to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, one of the largest arts festivals in the world. The stage it left from seats a fraction of what you'd find at the Kravis Center or the Broward Center. It's the Stonzek Studio Theater, tucked inside the Lake Worth Playhouse, a building most residents drive past without a second look.
That's the thing about Lake Worth Beach's arts scene. The part everyone knows about happens one weekend a year, when the Street Painting Festival turns Lake and Lucerne Avenues into a hundred-thousand-person outdoor gallery. The part fewer people track is what's happening the other fifty weeks, in rooms that seat forty people instead of forty thousand. This month gives you a clean look at both halves at once.
From Silent Films to a Send-Off to Scotland
The building at 713 Lake Avenue has been putting on shows since 1924, when brothers Clarence and Lucien Oakley opened it as the Oakley Theatre, complete with a Wurlitzer pipe organ for silent films. A hurricane in 1928 tore the roof off and destroyed the organ along with the theater's original Moorish Deco facade. The Oakleys rebuilt it in Streamline Moderne style and reopened in 1929, adding a neon sign that, according to the Lake Worth Playhouse's own history, may still be the oldest one operating in its original location anywhere in the country.
The Depression ended the Oakley family's run. Both brothers died within a year of each other in the early 1930s, and the theater changed hands and names more than once over the following decades. A group of local residents incorporated as the Lake Worth Playhouse in 1953 and staged productions out of the third floor of the old city hall for over twenty years before finally buying the building outright in 1975 and restoring it. Today it's a contributing structure to the Historic Old Town Commercial District, listed on the National Register of Historic Places since 2001, and it holds the distinction of being the oldest surviving Art Deco building in Palm Beach County.
The neon sign added during the 1929 rebuild may be the oldest one still operating in its original location in the United States.
None of that history explains why an international festival is now booking work out of its smaller room. That part comes down to what the Playhouse has quietly built inside the Stonzek space over the past few years: a black box stage willing to host work that wouldn't get picked up anywhere else in the county first.
What's Actually Playing This Month
Karlin's piece, staged at the Stonzek before its Fringe run, is the kind of show that typically premieres in a bigger city and tours down to South Florida later, not the other way around. Lake Worth Beach got it first.
The room doesn't slow down after that. On August 15, the Stonzek hosts Give Me the Mic, a three-hour showcase presented by Bad Side Records that puts independent South Florida musicians on the same stage, tickets running $20 with one intermission. It's a different audience and a different sound than the Karlin piece, which is the point. The Playhouse operates on what it calls a never-be-dark policy: there's almost always something scheduled, whether that's a touring solo act, a local band showcase, or one of the theater's own mainstage productions.
If you've lived here a while, you've probably noticed the marquee lit up on a Tuesday and wondered what was playing. This is your answer for August.
The Bar Three Doors Down Has a Stage Too
Walk a few blocks up Lake Avenue from the Playhouse and you hit Cugini Wine Bar and Art Gallery at 804 Lake Ave, open Wednesday through Sunday evenings. It pours estate wines from Calabria that aren't sold anywhere else in the country, but the wine isn't really the reason it belongs in this conversation. Cugini built itself around a rotating gallery of local artists and a stage for live music, so a Saturday night there tends to layer a wine tasting, a room full of paintings for sale, and a set from whoever's booked that week into one stop.
Head the other direction and you land on J Street, where the Bamboo Room has built a long-running reputation for Sunday night reggae, with a live band that regulars know by the host's first name, Bradley, and a kitchen turning out jerk chicken late into the night. It's the kind of weekly tradition that never makes a tourism brochure because it doesn't need to. The people who show up already know.
None of these three spots are marketing themselves as a scene. They just happen to sit inside the same walkable downtown grid, which means a single evening can move from a gallery wall to a wine glass to a reggae set without anyone getting back in a car.
The Festival Is the Highlight Reel. This Is the Everyday Cut.
Every February, the Lake Worth Beach Street Painting Festival shuts down Lake and Lucerne Avenues between Dixie and Federal Highways so more than 800 artists can turn the pavement into chalk murals for a weekend, drawing more than 100,000 visitors over two days. It's the reason a lot of people outside the neighborhood know Lake Worth Beach has an arts identity at all.
But that festival isn't an anomaly the city produces once a year and then rests on. It's the loudest expression of something that's running quietly the rest of the time, in a hundred-year-old theater sending original work to Scotland, in a wine bar with paintings for sale on the walls, in a reggae night that's been happening on J Street long enough that nobody remembers when it started. The festival gets the write-ups. The Tuesday-night marquee doesn't. Both are the same infrastructure.
If you want to see the everyday version for yourself, a single week gives you a decent sample:
- Any Wednesday through Sunday evening: Cugini Wine Bar and Art Gallery, 804 Lake Ave, for wine and a rotating local art collection
- August 15: Give Me the Mic at the Stonzek Studio Theater, 713 Lake Avenue, 7 p.m., $20
- Any Sunday night: live reggae at the Bamboo Room on J Street
None of it requires a drive to West Palm Beach or a ticket to Miami. It's already three blocks apart on the same street you've probably taken to the pharmacy a dozen times without stopping.
That's the part worth sitting with. A city this size doesn't usually have a working theater sending a show overseas, a working gallery bar, and a working live music tradition all inside a five-minute walk of each other. Most towns get one of those, if they're lucky. Lake Worth Beach built all three without much fanfare, and it kept building even after the festival crowds went home in February.
If you're already living here, you probably knew about one of these three spots and not the others, which is exactly how a neighborhood keeps surprising the people who've lived in it the longest. And if a friend or family member ever asks you what it's actually like to spend a normal week in Lake Worth Beach, this is a better answer than the pier and the beach alone.
For anything real estate related in Lake Worth Beach or anywhere else in Palm Beach County, Roxy Campbell has been working this market since 2003 and knows it block by block. Call or text Roxy at (561) 714-9673.
