This summer, the Aurora Grand theater opened its doors to downtown Juneau, bringing life back into the historic Gross 20th Century Theatre building in the center of town. As a second-run theater, the main focus is bringing old favorites back to the big screen. For example, recent showings of “The Emperor’s New Groove” and “The Princess Bride” brought big crowds wanting to see childhood staples many had never experienced in theater. The team behind the theater has also already proven the space’s capacity as a venue for live performances.
Spearheaded by Elise LaBonte, James McSweeney, and Emelia Sween, who met working for the Alaska Marine Highway System, the theater has already successfully screened a nostalgic list of 80s and 90s-kid favorites like “The Sandlot” and “Fightclub.”
“I always told myself that as soon as I’m done with boats, I’m going to go back to working in theater,” said McSweeney, who did theater tech during high school and worked in dinner theater before going to a marine academy. “What I was imagining was just going back to working for tech and doing props and lights but with the theater being for lease I called the landlords.”
The two-story space is a haven of old memories for many Juneauites who grew up seeing movies there.
“I grew up in Juneau and I remember the first boy who held my hand at that movie theater,” laughed Amber Butler, a volunteer who helped the trio upholster the seating in the upstairs theater. “My mom also grew up here and she remembers (seeing her dad in a Rotary Club performance) on the stage in the big theater. There’s just so much history and so many memories of people in there that it makes this feel like a little rebirth.”
The original 20th Century Gross Theatre opened downtown in 1940, and in the 1980s the Gross family converted the theater balcony into a second space with its own screen to double movie capacity in the building. The last movie was shown there just before the pandemic and has since sat empty until this current revival brought it back to life.
Upgrading the space has been no simple feat, most of it having been done by LaBronte, McSweeney and Sween themselves. The renovations are being done with the support of the Gross family, the landlords and with the help from a small team of volunteers and employees.
“The downstairs is a huge project. There are some down-to-the-bones repairs that need to be made,” McSweeney said. “That’s why we decided to start with the upstairs: It’s more contained, it’s smaller and we had a pretty clear vision of what we want to do up there.”
The first three months of rehabilitation in the upstairs space were mostly spent inside Tyvek suits addressing water damage, re-plastering the ceiling and deep-cleaning the carpets.
Upstairs, which is already open, the team is hoping for a mix of movies, events, live shows and music. Already proving successful in its capacity to host high-energy creative performances and rowdy crowds, Aurora Grand recently hosted Juneau Drag’s “A Monroe Family Affair.”
“They hosted Glitz and there was so much excitement,” said Butler of Juneau Drag’s Pride month show. “People were just so happy to gather in the lobby and see people they knew and talk with one another. It was just such a wonderful space and it made everybody’s spirits higher.”
In the downstairs venue, which isn’t yet open, they’re planning to have about 120 seats for smaller productions. With a tiered, coliseum-style seating arrangement, the space lends itself to a kind of intimate, black box style theater production.
“There’s so many different ways that we could change the downstairs space and make it more functional. We could pull out all the seats in the summertime and put tables so we can have a lunch-time theater with live performances, and then we could return the seats in the winter. Or we could have a flexible seating system so that we could change the space for weddings or different live performances,” McSweeney said. “Those are the things that I spend time imagining, but I’m just really excited to have a historic stage brought back online and back into the hands of the community.”
Keeping true to the structure’s historic design elements, the team has plans to put a marquee back up, the original of which hung just far enough over the street to be taken out by a moving truck in the 70s. Other plans include re-opening a ticket booth on the sidewalk, and restoring the original chandelier in the downstairs space.
“I have a vision for creating a space in downtown Juneau that’s worthy of getting dressed up for and that’s kind of awe-inspiring or grand,” McSweeney said, hoping the venue will encourage shows and build out the aesthetic of having a downtown Juneau theater scene.
Rachel Levy is a Juneau-based photojournalist whose work culminates at the intersections of environmental justice, arts and culture, and sustainable tourism. A 2022 graduate of Harvard University's Environmental Policy program, she is also the director of the award-winning documentary "Hidden in Plain Sight" that exposes the labor exploitation and colonial framework burdening Tanzania's safari industry.
