5th Avenue Theatre, Historic theatre in downtown Seattle, United States.

The 5th Avenue Theatre occupies the Skinner Building at 1308 Fifth Avenue, a five-to-eight-story office block with shops at street level. Its 2,130-seat auditorium lies behind a Neo-Renaissance exterior, while the interior imitates Chinese wooden temple construction: a two-story lobby with red stenciled columns, a plaster bamboo canopy, and an octagonal caisson from which a five-toed Imperial dragon suspends a glass chandelier.

The building opened in autumn 1926 as a movie palace with a large public turnout and showed films until the early seventies. After that, it was converted into a musical theatre where singing and dance performances have taken place since.

The 5th Avenue Theatre has served as a testing ground for musicals before their Broadway debuts, with Jekyll & Hyde, Hairspray, Aladdin and The Wedding Singer among the shows launched here. Its subscriber season mixes locally produced revivals of musical classics, premieres of bound-for-Broadway shows and national touring musicals, six to seven productions a year. The theatre also runs education and outreach programs reaching over 61,000 students, performers and audience members annually.

The theatre sits inside the Skinner Building at 1308 Fifth Avenue, entered from the avenue under the marquee; the auditorium, lobby and balcony are reached from that street entry. The original central free-standing box office was replaced in a 1979 renovation by one beside the entrance, and the two Imperial guardian lions that once stood outside were moved indoors then. Seating is 2,130.

The University of Washington owns the building and the land, which were once part of its original campus. Today, the site is one of the largest employers in the theatre sector across the entire Puget Sound region.