Le Grand David Spectacular Magic Company History
By 1976, the Cabot Cinema seemed on the downslope of its career, offering last-run movies for pocket change. A corporation called White Horse Productions was formed to buy and renovate it. Spearheading the project was the man now known as Marco the Magi, aided by business and artistic friends. The Cabot was kept open as a movie house, renamed the Cabot Street Cinema Theatre with a revamped film program.
Meanwhile, the troupe undertook a concentrated effort to restore her full stage, which lay thick with the dust of fifty years’ disuse. Office space above Cabot Street was transformed into workshops for carpenters, painters, and seamstresses. The hundreds of props and scenic elements turned out during six months’ work were gradually put into play in after-hours rehearsals. An entertainment calendar published every two weeks began announcing the debut of a stage attraction just after holiday time 1976.
On a day remembered for heavy snow and a sizable, receptive house, Le Grand David and his own Spectacular Magic Company premiered Sunday, February 20, 1977. Headed by Marco and his one-time apprentice David, the company of several dozen performers gave weekly Sunday matinée performances until mid-May. Then a second Sunday show was added, at 8:15 p.m. By mid-summer even this schedule was not enough to meet demand. “The Whirlwind of Enchantment” offered eighteen shows in a fortnight. Boston-area theatergoers and the regional media were beginning to catch wind of Beverly’s enchantment.
It would be three years before the story went international, carried around the globe by the likes of TIME and Smithsonian magazines and an enthralled magic press. Robert Lund (1920–1995), founder and curator of the American Museum of Magic in Marshall, Michigan, dubbed it “the finest magic show in the world today.”
The Le Grand David Spectacular Magic Company soon became a cultural institution. Seven performances at the White House in Washington, D.C., over 40 cover stories in magic periodicals followed. Robert Lund wrote, “Of all the practitioners of the presto trade in the U.S., none has better credentials to the title of America’s national magic company than Le Grand David.” The esteemed British magic historian and collector Dr. Edwin Dawes called the Beverly bafflers “magicdom’s most incredible venture.”
Building on the success of the Cabot effort, the Le Grand David Spectacular Magic Company purchased the Larcom Theatre, just four blocks away, in 1984 and launched a restoration project that dwarfed their previous Cabot Street Cinema Theatre restoration . The Larcom received a balcony-to-boiler-room renovation. In October 1985 the Le Grand David troupe premiered a second resident production of conjuring, music, comedy and dance “in the style and tradition of the turn of the last century.” An Anthology of Stage Magic continues to play there.
In 1995, the Le Grand David Company opened an expanded wing adjoining the original Larcom structure. The new wing includes: the Grand Salon lobby appointed in oak, marble, and brass, rehearsal place, three galleries of Le Grand David apparatus and poster artwork, a library, a meeting room, a guest suite, and a caretaker's apartment.
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