Cabot Street Cinema Theatre
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The Cinema Street Cinema Theatre is located at 286 Cabot Street in Beverly, Massachusetts. It offers live performances of the Le Grand David Spectacular Magic Company and art house films. See performance schedules at legranddavid.com. Click on "At the Cabot" for film times.
For almost ninety years the Cabot Street Cinema Theatre has been an important part of the Boston's North Shore community. Harris and Glover Ware, two brothers and former vaudeville musicians from Marblehead, Massachusetts, built the Cabot eight years after the construction of their first Beverly theater, the Larcom Theatre. The Cabot was originally known as the Ware Theatre when it opened in 1920 and was described as having “the most impressive auditorium of its size east of New York.” Erected with ballyhoo and great expense in 1920, it was immediately Beverly’s grandest playhouse. Large enough to accommodate any kind of entertainment, from silent pictures to opera, the Cabot was also grand enough—with its frescoes, filigrees, golden dome, and full balcony—to rival big-city show palaces.
The Cabot's architects were Funk and Wilcox, who had already made a name for themselves with the Athenaeum and the Strand Theatre in Dorchester, Massachusetts. Back then, movie palaces included fully equipped stages because film showings were often preceded by live acts—vaudeville. They were also built with orchestra pits for musicians who accompanied the silent films and the stage production.
Out of the 20,000 movie palaces entertaining America in 1920, the National Trust for Historic Preservation estimates that less than 250 remain. Eighty-seven years after it opened, the Cabot maintains a grand tradition of elegant movie-going and live stage entertainment thanks to impresario Marco the Magi. He stated, “The total effect of a motion picture is conditioned by the environment in which it is shown.” Marco selects the Cabot’s “films worth seeing more than once;” he directs its attentive tuxedoed ushering staff, and designs its interior decor, including the fresh cut flower bouquets. Raised in the grand tradition from which the Cabot was born, he has allowed movie-going to be an occasion where a community gathers to be entertained in an elegant environment.
