Mac Rating: 5.00 | Votes: 1 | Date: 03/07/2026 02:04:00

Albuquerque's first movie palace opened with a live orchestra in 1924; a century later the same room runs deathcore and Deadmau5. The Sunshine Theater at 120 Central Avenue SW occupies the ground floor of the six-storey Sunshine Building, designed by El Paso's Trost and Trost for theatre magnate Joseph Barnett and opened on 1 May 1924 with the Ramon Novarro film Scaramouche. The building was the Southwest at its most ambitious - reinforced concrete, central heating and cooling, 73 offices above a 900-plus-seat auditorium equipped for both film and travelling vaudeville, advertised as the most modern and beautiful theater in the region. First-run films carried the house for five decades until 1974; the theatre closed in the 1980s and survived a demolition threat in 1984-85 that helped push the building onto the National Register and the city's landmark rolls. The 1990s remodel turned the auditorium into downtown Albuquerque's hardest-working live room - an all-ages floor with a 21-plus bar in the old balcony - and the booking has run heavy ever since: The Strokes, Snoop Dogg, Queens of the Stone Age, Arctic Monkeys, Deftones, Cannibal Corpse and Smashing Pumpkins among hundreds. The venue owns a specific niche - the biggest metal, punk and hip-hop tours that Albuquerque's theatres and arenas do not fit - making it the metro's default room for loud national acts and the stage local heavy bands aspire to. The Route 66 address at Central and Second keeps the theatre at the centre of downtown's nightlife strip, its blade sign glowing over the same sidewalk it lit in 1924. The Moonlight Lounge operates in a corner of the main floor as the venue's second bar and after-show room, and the building's 73 upstairs offices still lease as workspace - a 1924 mixed-use formula that quietly subsidised the theatre through every era of its century.