Destinations | The Village Theater, Coronado Island
No visit to San Diego is complete without a jaunt to this immaculately restored & reimagined first-run mini palace
by Michael Gaughn
updated December 23, 2022
Many towns have smaller vintage cinemas that they attempt to make attractive and relevant, with varying degrees of success. But you rarely, if ever, find an intimate older theater showing first-run films on three screens, the whole reimagined by a world-famous designer and nestled in a storied and storybook community as theatrical as the theater itself. That would be The Village Theater on Coronado Island.
Originally opened in 1947, the Village was shuttered in 2000, only to be boldly brought back by Vintage Cinema‘s Lance Alspaugh, who specializes in reviving Southern California theaters and last graced these pages when we described his efforts to help Quentin Tarantino reboot LA’s fabled Vista Theatre. Alspaugh was put on the trail of the Village by his contacts at Warner Brothers, who told him there was a small theater on the San Diego island that had fallen into disrepair but was well worth preserving.
Rather than just slap on a new coat of paint and call it a day, Alspaugh went big (thanks to generous support from the City of Coronado Redevelopment Agency), luring theater designer Joseph Musil, probably best known for his work on Disney’s flagship El Capitan in LA, out of retirement to buff and polish this, in its modest way, spectacular gem. The result was part restoration, part grand riff, a kind of Deco meets Xanadu take on movie-
above | the main auditorium of the Village Theater, the work of famed designer Joseph Musil
820 Orange Avenue
Coronado, California
—191-seat main auditorium
—two screening rooms with 42 seats each
—Sony 4K digital projection
—7.1-channel Dolby sound
—first-run movies
—classic films the last Wednesday of
every month
not just another movie theater, the Village is a celebration of Coronado Island, San Diego, and Southern California in general
The Artechouse NYC show The Life of a Neuron incorporates the work of a number of artists to tell the story of neurons
going that pulled the Village out of the musty past and into the present, turning it into a celebration of Coronado and San Diego, and of Southern California in general.
Part of the attraction of visiting the Village is exactly that’s it not a tourist mecca but, with its 191-seat main auditorium and two 42-seat screening rooms, a kind of mini palace still very much in the service of the community. It’s not to stand in awe of but to be charmed by and settle into, its flair not meant to be awe-inspiring so much as soothing, conducive to easing into a relaxing night at the movies.
For all its retro trappings, the Village is very much a modern cinema, replete with Sony 4K digital projection and 7.1 Dolby surround—but so far no Atmos because, like with the Vista, nobody’s yet found a way to deploy the height speakers without making hash out of the décor. And while the seats are contemporary and comfortable, there’s been no strong inclination to replace them with loungers because of the dissonance that kind of too cushy outsized seating would create with the surroundings.
Both intimate and ebullient, the Village is a perfect fit for Coronado, a place designed for desultory strolls, lined with the requisite small shops and bistros, all wrapped up in a seaside atmosphere free of big, look-at-me gestures—with the possible exception of the
click on the image to enlarge
the proscenium of Disney’s El Capitan Theatre in Los Angeles, probably Musil’s most famous restoration
the iconic Hotel del Coronado, probably best known from Some Like It Hot, is just down Orange Avenue from the Village Theater
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famed Hotel del Coronado, instantly recognizable as the resort where Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon, and Marilyn Monroe mixed things up in Some Like it Hot, and just a short, diverting walk down Orange Avenue from the Village.
Just over the bridge from San Diego, the Village Theater is inviting for dinner and a movie, a day within Coronado’s Brigadoon-like world within the larger world, or, coupled with an extended stay at the Hotel Del, the entertainment complement to a romantic retreat in this most romantic of border towns.
Michael Gaughn—The Absolute Sound, The Perfect Vision, Wideband, Stereo Review, Sound & Vision, The Rayva Roundtable, marketing, product design, some theater designs, a couple TV shows, some commercials, and now this.
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