Mac Rating: 5.00 | Votes: 1 | Date: 03/07/2026 00:33:00

The silent-movie house that Little Burgundy refused to let die. The Beanfield Theatre at 2490 rue Notre-Dame Ouest opened on 11 November 1912 as the Family Theatre, designed by Joseph-Cajetan Dufort and Louis-Theophile Decary for silent film with live accompaniment - orchestra pit at the footlights, dressing rooms tucked beneath the compact stage. Sold in 1923 and renamed the Corona, it gained its lasting interior from decorator Emmanuel Briffa: Corinthian columns, allegorical paintings, stencilled ceilings and an original painted curtain that survives to this day, joined in 1938 by the cast-iron marquee. The theatre thrived until the early 1960s, then fell to the city in 1967 for an urban renewal scheme that never came - condemned, used as a warehouse, and kept alive only in neighbourhood memory and the occasional film shoot. The Institut des arts de la scene bought the building in 1997 and reopened it in 1998 after careful restoration; of all Montreal's cinema-era theatres it is the only survivor with both facade and interior essentially intact. Evenko has managed the room through its recent lives - including a Virgin Mobile-branded chapter - before the 2023 renaming under Beanfield sponsorship. Today the hall runs 950 standing at full capacity, 513 in cabaret and 589 seated across parterre and steep balcony, booking touring indie, rock, electronic, francophone and comedy acts several nights a week as one of the city's essential mid-size rooms. Little Burgundy's Notre-Dame restaurant strip surrounds it and the Lionel-Groulx metro is minutes away - a 1912 room, in other words, doing exactly the job it was built for. Briffa's interior is the room's quiet superpower: the decorator dressed dozens of Montreal cinemas between the wars, and the Corona is effectively his surviving museum - restored plasterwork, allegorical panels and that 1912 hand-painted curtain still rising by manual guillotine. Heritage recognition and the Sauvons Montreal preservation prize followed the 1998 rescue, and the sold-out calendars since have settled the argument the demolition crews nearly won in 1967.