American Psycho | Phoenix Concert Theatre — The Dance Floor Where He Tries to Buy Cocaine

The club scene needed a room that could pass for a Manhattan velvet-rope palace and still be booked for a night in Toronto. The production took 410 Sherbourne Street: a big, dark, low-ceilinged hall with a dance floor wide enough to lose people on, strobes, and a balcony from which everyone below looks identical. Bateman moves through it trying to buy drugs from a dealer who despises him, and the room does the work — nobody in shot is looking at anybody else's face.

The building started as the German-Canadian Club Harmonie, a community hall rather than a nightclub. In the early 1980s the New York hospitality operator Pat Kenny, who traded on being the Bard of Bleecker Street, turned it into a music venue, and the Diamond Club opened in the summer of 1984, modelled on Manhattan's Cat Club and running Thursday to Saturday. It reopened under its current name in 1991. Capacity is 1,350 across three rooms: the main hall, the balcony lounge called Le Loft, and the Parlour at the back with its own sound system and pool tables.

Go while you can. In October 2024 the owners announced they intend to move the Phoenix, while continuing to operate at Sherbourne Street through 2026.

Buy a ticket to whatever is playing, stand at the rail on the balcony, and look down at the floor for a full minute without picking out a single individual. That is the shot.