Defunct Theater and Movie Houses in the Philippines

For more than 500 years, the Philippines was under the auspices of the Church and directives of the Royal Crown. During those long years, the Spaniards exerted their culture over ours. Thus, we came to adopt the wearing of garmented clothes, eating bananas and planting tobacco, or veneration of the saints side by side with local anitos and, and watching theatrical plays like zarzuela in makeshift areas such as vacant lots. Foreign investors realized the need for a complex where operas and plays could be performed on a regular basis. Hence, the birth of theater and movie houses in the Philippines. Below are just some of the old/defunct/nostalgic yet ultimately significant complexes that once flourished in Philippine performing arts.

Teatro Circo de Zorilla (a theater for the elites),