Stateside at the Paramount

The State Theatre opened at 719 Congress Avenue, next door to the Paramount, on Christmas Day 1935 with The Bride Comes Home, a comedy starring Claudette Colbert and Fred MacMurray. Interstate Theatres had architect W. Scott Dunne convert an existing building, and the result was the first theater in Austin built specifically to show movies. It was Interstate's fourth Austin house, after the Paramount, the Queen and the Capitol, and part of the Congress Avenue strip once called Show Row. Like the Paramount, it segregated its audiences; civil rights activists picketed the box offices of both theaters before the Austin Chamber of Commerce called for complete integration of public facilities in April 1963. After a period of vacancy, Live Oak Theatre bought the building and reopened it in January 1995 as a home for its stage company, led by artistic director Don Toner. Sinclair Black designed that mid-1990s renovation. In 2000 the State Theater Company merged with the Paramount Theatre for the Performing Arts, and the board chose a plain name for the combined nonprofit: the Austin Theatre Alliance. In 2006 a broken water main flooded the theater. The State shares a basement with the neighboring 721 Congress building, then under development, and its stage stayed dark for years while its acting school kept running. A Chris Titus show on February 1, 2011, was reported as its first performance in nearly five years. Renamed Stateside at the Paramount, the roughly 300-seat house is equipped for both film and live shows. It screens films during the Paramount Summer Classic Film Series, and a 2026 KUT report described a showing of 12 Angry Men there before an audience of hundreds. It also hosts Moontower comedy sets and concerts. The building lies within the Congress Avenue Historic District but has no individual city landmark designation, so when Clayton Korte Architects brought a remodel to the Historic Landmark Commission in 2023, the commission could only comment. That plan included a rooftop lounge, an interior link to the Paramount, and a replica of the State's neon vertical sign, one of the oldest signs downtown. In November 2025 the Austin Theatre Alliance folded the State into its $65 million Shine On campaign. After the Paramount's restoration, the State is to get a full interior rebuild in the Art Deco style its facade suggests, with telescopic seating for 435, a basement bar, a rooftop bar and a shared elevator, work expected to take 13 to 16 months.