Cabot Street Cinema Theatre

The Cabot Street Cinema Theatre is located at 286 Cabot Street in Beverly, Massachusetts. It offered live performances of the Le Grand David Spectacular Magic Company from February 1977 through May 2012. During that time the resident company also showed feature films "worth seeing more than once." On May 15, 2013, the owners/Le Grand David company announced that the Cabot was for sale.For more than 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. When it opened, "announcements for the gala premier of the theatre boasted of a "$50,000 Austin Pipe Organ." In today’s dollars, this cost was the equivalent of well over half a million dollars."The Cabot's architects were Funk and Wilcox, who had already made a name for themselves with the Athenaeum and the Strand Theatre (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.