Seville Theatre
115 Sawyer Street,
South Portland,
ME
04106
115 Sawyer Street,
South Portland,
ME
04106
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This 1924 photo from the Maine Historical Society shows the Strand to have been a second-floor house above a hardware store. The Cinema Data Project page for this theater doesn’t list any aka’s, and the only Nordica Theatres listed for Maine by the Project are the ones in Freeport and Lisbon.
The aka’s appear to have been obtained from this PDF, the penultimate page of which features a small photo of High Street which shows a small sliver of the theater building at left. Despite its Sawyer Street address, the photos show that the entrance to the Strand was on the High Street side of the building, though the doors did face up the block in the direction of Sawyer Street.
I’ve been unable to find the Strand in South Portland mentioned in Boxoffice Magazine, thought here was a Strand in Portland that got mentioned a few times. I found a single mention of the Seville Theatre in South Portland, in the October 9, 1937, issue, which said that the operator, Russell Mack, had gotten married.
The South Portland theater that got the most exposure in Boxoffice was called the Cape Theatre, a 450-seat house opened in September, 1938. It was operating as late as 1958, but after that is mentioned only twice that I can find, and those mentions are retrospective.
But the Cape was not the only theater operating in South Portland in 1944, when the August 12 issue of Boxoffice reported that Leon Gorman had sold the Cape Theatre to Ralph Snider of the R.E. Snider Circuit. “Snider now operates three houses in South Portland,” the item said. It’s possible that the Strand/Seville was one of the unnamed two.
Also known as the Seville Theatre in its later years.