Venue: Teatro Paramount
Town: São Paulo, BR

Teatro Renault (English: Renault Theater), also known as Teatro Paramount (Paramount Theater) and Teatro Abril (Abril Theater), is located on Brigadeiro Luís Antônio Avenue, in the Brazilian city of São Paulo. It opened in 1929, burned down in 1969 and reopened in 2001. The construction of the Paramount Theater began in 1927. Owned by Paramount Pictures, it was designed by engineer Arnaldo Maia Lello and architects Francisco Augusto da Silva Rocha and Francisco de Paula Ramos de Azevedo using a combination of art deco and eclectic styles. It accommodated 1,800 people, including the audience, balcony and boxes, and was the first sound cinema in Latin America. Before construction, the site was occupied by the Palace Theatro, an old wooden house owned by Alberto Andrade and dedicated to showing plays, circus shows and films. In April 1929, the theater premiered in the presence of Melville Shauer, a representative of Paramount's foreign department. The movie The Patriot, with Swiss actor Emil Jennings in the lead role, was chosen for the opening night. There was also a performance by the symphony orchestra conducted by Leo Renard and a speech by Sebastião Sampaio, the Consul General of Brazil in New York, which became the first broadcast with sound in Latin America through the Movietone audio system. The theater gained prominence as a concert hall during the 1930s and 1940s, and began hosting São Paulo's grand carnival balls in the 1950s. In the 1960s, it was sold to Record, which used the venue to broadcast the program O Fino da Bossa, presented by Elis Regina and Jair Rodrigues, and the III Festival de Música Popular Brasileira, held in 1967 with the participation of Edu Lobo, Caetano Veloso, Chico Buarque and Gilberto Gil. In 1969, a fire partially destroyed the Paramount Theater. The venue was renovated and only the original foyer and facade were kept. In the new project, the space was divided into five cinemas, including three small projection rooms on the first fl