This article contains text that is written in a promotional tone .(June 2022) |
On February 20, 2012, Le Grand David and His Spectacular Magic Company celebrated its 35th anniversary. The company was then the longest consecutively running stage magic show in the world, according to Guinness World Records. [1] Marco the Magi (Cesareo Pelaez) started the show in the 1970s. [2] The family-oriented stage magic show ran most Sundays at the Cabot Street Cinema Theatre and some Thursdays at the Larcom Theatre in Beverly, Massachusetts through the Spring of 2012.
On February 20, 1977, with little advance publicity, Le Grand David and his own Spectacular Magic Company made its debut on the stage of the Cabot Street Cinema Theatre, and ran for 35 years. In 1985, the Le Grand David Company opened a second two-hour show of magic, music, comedy, and dance at Beverly's other antique playhouse, the Larcom Theatre. The two productions showcased: over 1000 costumes, 700 entrances and exits, 100 classic illusions, 45 backdrops, 35 years in a small town, 4 hours of stage magic, and 2 antique theaters. The shows were produced, directed, designed and choreographed by Marco the Magi.
In the spring of 2012, it was announced that:
An auction of props, artwork, bronzes and memorabilia was held on February 23, 2014. [3] With over 200 items available, the auction was conducted by Kaminski Auctioneers. [4]
Marco the Magi (Cesareo Pelaez, October 16, 1932 - March 24, 2012) is billed as the troupe’s founder, producer, director, designer, and choreographer. He was also a star in both productions. He began to organize his troupe in the early 1970s and brought it to Beverly. The aging Cabot Cinema became available in 1976, and the company Marco already had been forming acquired the playhouse outright. A biography of Cesareo Pelaez (Wonderful Surprises, author Avrom Surath) was published in April 2007 (second, updated edition in March 2012) relating Pelaez's early experiences growing up in Cuba, his work with noted psychologist Abraham Maslow, his founding Le Grand David Spectacular Magic Company, and his ongoing work with the company to 2012, the year of his death.
Le Grand David (David Bull) began as an apprentice to Marco in the early 1970s, and is a generation younger than Marco. According to magic historian Stuart Cramer, “Le Grand David is an extraordinarily skillful magician and showman. He adds youth, verve, and graceful motion to a show filled with color and action. David’s manipulation of the Zombie [floating silver ball] is the best I have ever even the immortal Neil Foster’s.” (MAGICOL: A Journal of the Magic Collectors’ Association, November, 1993)
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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 British magic historian and collector Dr. Edwin Dawes called the Beverly bafflers “magicdom’s most incredible venture.”[ citation needed ]
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.”[ attribution needed ]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.
Beverly is a city in Essex County, Massachusetts, and a suburb of Boston. The population was 42,670 at the time of the 2020 United States Census. A resort, residential, and manufacturing community on the Massachusetts North Shore, Beverly includes Ryal Side, Beverly Farms and Prides Crossing. Beverly is a rival of Marblehead for the title of being the "birthplace of the U.S. Navy".
The Groundlings are an improvisational and sketch comedy troupe and school based in Los Angeles, California. The troupe was formed by Gary Austin in 1974 and uses an improv format influenced by Viola Spolin, whose improvisational theater techniques were used by Del Close and other members of the Second City, located in Chicago and later St. Louis. They used these techniques to produce sketches and improvised scenes. Its name is taken from Shakespeare's Hamlet, Act III, Scene II: "...to split the ears of the groundlings, who for the most part are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumbshows and noise." In 1975 the troupe purchased and moved into its current location on Melrose Avenue.
The North Shore is a region in the U.S. state of Massachusetts, loosely defined as the coastal area between Boston and New Hampshire. The region is made up both of a rocky coastline, dotted with marshes and wetlands, as well as several beaches and natural harbors. The North Shore is an important historical, cultural, and economic region of Massachusetts. The southern part of the region includes several of Boston's densely populated inner suburbs. At the center of the North Shore lies its most prominent geographic feature, Cape Ann, with numerous small fishing towns, and at the northern end lies the Merrimack Valley, which was a major locus of the Industrial Revolution in the United States.
This timeline of magic is a history of the performing art from B.C. to the present.
Theater in Chicago describes not only theater performed in Chicago, Illinois, but also to the movement in Chicago that saw a number of small, meagerly funded companies grow to institutions of national and international significance. Chicago had long been a popular destination for touring productions, as well as original productions that transfer to Broadway and other cities. According to Variety editor Gordon Cox, beside New York City, Chicago has one of the most lively theater scenes in the United States. As many as 100 shows could be seen any given night from 200 companies as of 2018, some with national reputations and many in creative "storefront" theaters, demonstrating a vibrant theater scene "from the ground up". According to American Theatre magazine, Chicago's theater is "justly legendary".
Carnival is a musical, originally produced by David Merrick on Broadway in 1961, with the book by Michael Stewart and music and lyrics by Bob Merrill. The musical is based on the 1953 film Lili, which again was based on the short story and treatment titled "The Seven Souls of Clement O'Reilly" by Paul Gallico. The show's title originally used an exclamation point ; it was eventually dropped during the show's run, as director Gower Champion felt it gave the wrong impression, saying, "It's not a blockbuster. It's a gentle show."
A group of pre-Vaudevillian acrobats founded in the early 1840s, the Hanlon-Lees were world-renowned practitioners of "entortillation" – that is, tumbling, juggling, and an early form of "knockabout" comedy. The troupe consisted of the six Hanlon brothers and their mentor, established acrobat Professor John Lees.
The Magic Show is a one-act musical with music and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz and a book by Bob Randall. It starred magician Doug Henning. Produced by Edgar Lansbury, Joseph Beruh, and Ivan Reitman, it opened on May 28, 1974 at the Cort Theatre in Manhattan, and ran for 1,920 performances, closing on December 31, 1978. Henning was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in a Musical and director Grover Dale was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Direction of a Musical.
John Newport Caird is an English stage director and writer of plays, musicals and operas. He is an honorary associate director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, was for many years a regular director with the Royal National Theatre of Great Britain and is the principal guest director of the Royal Dramatic Theatre, Stockholm (Dramaten).
The Cabot Performing Arts Center is located at 286 Cabot Street in Beverly, Massachusetts.
The Larcom Theatre is a 600-seat auditorium located at 13 Wallis Street in Beverly, Massachusetts and offers live music, theatrical productions, ballet, and comedy.
The Teatro San Moisè was a theatre and opera house in Venice, active from 1620 to 1818. It was in a prominent location near the Palazzo Giustinian and the church of San Moisè at the entrance to the Grand Canal.
David Tobias "Theodore" Bamberg was an itinerant magician who traveled with his full evening magic show from the early to mid part of the 20th century. In Bamberg's autobiography, Robert Parrish wrote in the introduction that no other great illusionist could match Bamberg's skill. The Fu Manchu show was known for its comedy, drama, and color.
Lamb's Theatre was an Off-Broadway theater located at 130 West 44th Street, New York City inside the Manhattan Church of the Nazarene, near Times Square in New York City. It seated approximately 350 and specialized in musical productions. The building was built in 1904–05 in Neo-Georgian style, originally designed by Stanford White. The Lamb's Theater is not related in any way to the historic theater club, The Lambs.
Tromb-al-ca-zar, ou Les criminels dramatiques is a bouffonnerie musicale in one act of 1856 with music by Jacques Offenbach. The French libretto was by Charles-Désiré Dupeuty and Ernest Bourget. With its dialogue containing plays on words and stage business from contemporary Parisian dramas and operas, it is described by Kracauer as satirizing the romantic bandits of grand opera.
The Merry Frolics of Satan is a 1906 French silent film by Georges Méliès. The film is an updated comedic adaptation of the Faust legend, borrowing elements from two stage féerie spectaculars: Les Pilules du diable (1839), a classic stage fantasy with knockabout comedy, and Les Quatre Cents Coups du diable (1905), a satirical update of Les Pilules du diable to which Méliès had contributed two sequences, one of which he incorporated into the present film.
Féerie, sometimes translated as "fairy play", was a French theatrical genre known for fantasy plots and spectacular visuals, including lavish scenery and mechanically worked stage effects. Féeries blended music, dancing, pantomime, and acrobatics, as well as magical transformations created by designers and stage technicians, to tell stories with clearly defined melodrama-like morality and an extensive use of supernatural elements. The genre developed in the early 19th century and became immensely popular in France throughout the nineteenth century, influencing the development of burlesque, musical comedy and film.
The history of theatrical performances in Jersey can be traced back to the 18th century. The Opera House, opened by Lillie Langtry in 1900, and the Jersey Arts Centre are the main performance spaces, although performances also take place in parish halls and other venues.
Cesare Watry (1864–1943) was the stage name of Giovanni Girardi, an Italian practitioner of stage magic and a pioneer of cinema through his own original form of bioscope show. He was recognized, particularly in Latin America, as a “master illusionist” and an “extraordinary popular” entertainer both through stage magic and his bioscope shows.
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