Annville’s Allen Theatre charts path as combo cinema, bookshop, music venue

The Allen Theatre in Annville Township, under new ownership since 2024, has transformed from a first-run movie house into a cultural venue featuring live music, classic films and an adjacent bookstore café.

Michael Cantor and Cindy Vejar, husband and wife and passionate movie and music lovers who moved to Annville Township five years ago, purchased the theater and its adjacent café, at 36 E. Main St., early in 2024.

Read More: New Allen Theater owner brings along bookstore, and optimism on film & books

Whereas the theater previously showed first-run films and occasionally staged live events and ran the café only as a café, Cantor and Vejar added musical instruments, records, compact discs and used books to what is now known as the Salamander Bookstore Café.

“That’s going really well, and we’re finding that’s a real unique complementary business,” Cantor says.

Music acts like to perform at the theater because it’s a “very classic space,” he says. Capacity is 282 seats with a dance floor at the foot of the stage, or 300 seats if the dance floor is filled in with portable chairs. Music fans may BYOB, but please, no glass.

“During intermission, band members will come in and flip through the vinyl and buy stuff,” Cantor says. “We’re really trying to make this a cultural attraction. We’re really picky about the books we have —  philosophy and tons of classics.”

The Allen Theatre’s movies are no longer first-run, but more often are classics and arthouse films, with a number of horror classics thrown in during October for Halloween. Cantor and Vejar show three or four movies per month on average, with live music acts about once a week.

For instance, this week’s concert with “musician’s musician” Mike Keneally.

His Oct. 15 concert is a perfect match for the Allen Theatre. Download or drop the needle on Beer for Dolphins’ album, “Sluggo!” (1998) or “Dancing” (2000) and you’ll instantly recognize Frank Zappa’s influence on the band’s leader, Mike Keneally. His lyrics might be described as Zappa-meets-They Might Be Giants.

This is not coincidence.

Keneally is a seasoned session musician who played guitar and keyboards on Frank Zappa’s 1988 tour band and later joined Frank’s son Dweezil’s tribute band, Z. Talk about eclectic: Keneally was in Steve Vai’s tour band and the Miles Davis tribute band, Yo Miles! in the 1990s.

He calls his music “art-crazed guitar rock,” which makes it well-suited for a live performance at the historic theater.

Keneally and his Beer for Dolphins band play the Allen Theatre at 7 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 15, with special guests David Bainbridge and Sally Minnear, and a solo set by Matt Dorsey. Tickets are $25, or $35 for the sold-out front row, says Cantor.

“We’ve been really successful with tribute bands,” Cantor says. “We just started a songwriter’s circle, a singer-songwriter’s group.”

Pianist/keyboardist Andy Roberts leads a jazz series the first Thursday of every month.

Cantor and Vejar are looking to book more full-time performers like Keneally and Beer for Dolphins. Next up is Alex Skolnick, of the Trans-Siberian Orchestra and thrash-metal band Testament, along with his trio. These are “musician’s musicians,” Cantor says.

But that won’t cut into the theater’s healthy booking of tribute bands, he says.

“The way I look at tribute bands and the way I choose them is, it’s theater,” Cantor says. “You’re not going to see Led Zeppelin any more. You’re not going to see Pink Floyd any more.”

An early-Peter Gabriel tribute band’s act that played the theater made costume changes. A Meat Loaf tribute band “put on a stellar act. They dressed the part. It’s really a theatrical mentality,” he says. “The bands that just play the tunes? Not so much.”

Even with only his original music, Keneally promises quite a show for Wednesday. Matt Dorsey’s acoustic set, about 30 minutes long, will open the show, followed by a 40-minute set by David Bainbridge and Sally Minnear (daughter of Kerry Minnear of Gentle Giant, another of Keneally’s influences).

Keneally then will play for about two hours, joined by Bainbridge and Minnear for the last 30 minutes.

“And if the audience demands an encore, we’ll have one for them,” Keneally says.