The Grand was built as a complex, not a single auditorium. The theatre proper, six shops along the New Briggate frontage, and a set of Assembly Rooms all sat within the same High Victorian envelope, all facing the street together. The whole composition is Grade II* listed. Inside, the auditorium seats roughly 1,500, arranged in horseshoes around the proscenium and trimmed with the clustered columns and fan vaulting that Watson borrowed wholesale from medieval cathedrals. The Assembly Rooms became a cinema in 1907, the Assembly Rooms Cinema, then the Plaza from 1958. They have since come back to the theatre in a different guise.

For most of its first century, the Grand was run by the Howard and Wyndham chain, and the bill was the standard British fare of the touring era: plays, musicals, pantomime, revue. In 1970 Leeds City Council bought the building and began restoring it. Eight years later, the regional company Opera North was founded with the Grand as its home, and the theatre took on a second life as the operatic heart of the north of England. The relationship has shaped both organisations: the Grand has the stage, the pit, and the audience; Opera North has the company that fills them.

At the end of May 2005 the Grand closed for an estimated £31.5 million refurbishment that the theatre called, with capital-letter conviction, the Transformation. The stalls were reseated and reraked, the orchestra pit enlarged, and a state-of-the-art automated flying system installed in the grid above. Opera North gained two stage-sized rehearsal spaces and expanded offices to the south of the theatre, linked by a bridge and at street level. On 7 October 2006 the curtain came back up on Verdi's Rigoletto. A second phase restored the old Assembly Rooms as a second performance space, the Howard Assembly Room, now used for recitals, chamber operas, experimental work and education events for which the main house is too large.

The new flying system did exactly what it was bought to do. The Grand can now host the largest West End and Broadway musicals: Phantom, Wicked, Shrek, Dirty Dancing, We Will Rock You, Oliver, Six, Priscilla, Heathers. Northern Ballet visit regularly, and Kay Mellor's Band of Gold had its world stage premiere here in November 2019. The theatre is run by Leeds Heritage Theatres, a brand launched in August 2020 that also runs the City Varieties Music Hall and the Hyde Park Picture House. The Grand closed again with the rest of British theatre in March 2020 and reopened in June 2021 with Northern Ballet's Swan Lake. The curtain has been going up six nights a week ever since.