Mac Rating: 5.00 | Votes: 1 | Date: 03/07/2026 00:52:00

It took, in the new owners' words, "a lot of cleaning": for thirty years 2321 Main Street was the Fox Cinema, reputedly the last full-time 35mm adult-film theatre in North America, before reopening in 2014 as one of Vancouver's best-loved independent venues. The Fox Cabaret sits in the heart of Mount Pleasant, in a building whose retail lives date to the early 1900s. The address became a movie house in the mid-1970s as the Empire Cinema, ran as the art-house Savoy from 1980 - Rocky Horror and 3-D classics - and turned to X-rated fare as the Fox in August 1983. When the porn house finally closed in 2013, David Duprey of the Rickshaw Theatre and Danny Fazio's Waldorf Productions took the lease, ripped out two hundred stained seats, scrubbed the walls and built a balcony, opening the Fox Cabaret at the PuSh Festival in January 2014. The room that emerged holds a few hundred people and programs almost everything: touring indie, punk and electronic acts, local album releases, comedy, drag, film nights, dance parties and the long-running Sunday Service improv institution. Its size slots perfectly between the city's bars and its theatres, making it a rite-of-passage stage for rising Vancouver bands and a favourite intimate stop for touring cult acts. The venue wears its history with a smirk - the cabaret kept the Fox name, and the marquee outside still announces shows to a Main Street corridor that has gentrified around it into one of the city's densest strips of restaurants, breweries and record shops. Practical notes: most shows are 19-plus with ID, tickets sell through the venue site and local outlets, and the location at Main and East 7th is a short bus ride or twenty-minute walk from downtown, with Mount Pleasant's craft-beer triangle - Brassneck, Main Street Brewing, 33 Acres - supplying the pre-show. It is Vancouver's best redemption story in brick form.