A report on West End theatre

The Palace Theatre, in the City of Westminster, London, built in 1891

The London Palladium in Soho opened in 1910. While the Theatre has a resident show, it also has one-off performances such as concerts. Since 1930 it has hosted the Royal Variety Performance 43 times.

Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. Opened in May 1663, it is the oldest theatre in London.

Original interior of Savoy Theatre in 1881, the year it became the first public building in the world to be lit entirely by electricity.

The Lyceum Theatre, home to Disney's The Lion King.

Queen's Theatre showing Les Misérables, running in London since October 1985

The restored facade of the Dominion Theatre, as seen in 2017

The St Martin's Theatre, home to The Mousetrap, the world's longest-running play.

The Royal Court Theatre. Upstairs is used as an experimental space for new projects—The Rocky Horror Show premiered here in 1973.

West End theatres on Shaftesbury Avenue in 2016

Gilbert and Sullivan play at the Savoy in 1881

Victoria Palace Theatre (showing Billy Elliot in 2012) was refurbished in 2017.

Mainstream professional theatre staged in the large theatres in and near the West End of London.

- West End theatre

76 related topics with Alpha

The Mousetrap at the St Martin's Theatre: London's – and the world's – longest-running play: 28,152 performances by 2020

Long runs on the London stage, 1700–2020

1 links

Advertisement for a performance in the first run of The Beggar's Opera, 1828

Watkins Burroughs in Tom and Jerry, 1821

W.S.Penley as the bogus Charley's Aunt, 1892

The Mousetrap: plaque at the St Martin's Theatre

Runs of several thousand performances were familiar in West End theatres in the 21st century.

Duke of York's Theatre

2 links

The Duke of York's Theatre is a West End theatre in St Martin's Lane, in the City of Westminster, London.

Programme for the original production of Alice in Wonderland (1886)

Alice in Wonderland (musical)

3 links

Musical by Henry Savile Clarke , Walter Slaughter (music) and Aubrey Hopwood (lyrics), based on Lewis Carroll's books Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1871).

Phoebe Carlo as Alice, Edgar Norton as Hare, Dorothy D'Alcourt as Dormouse and Sydney Harcourt as Hatter in the original production (1886)

1898 revival: Rose Hersee talking to the White Rabbit

Libretto for the original production (1886)

Maidie Andrews as Alice in Alice Through the Looking-Glass – The Tatler (January 1904)

It debuted at the Prince of Wales Theatre in the West End in 1886.

J. M. Barrie

2 links

Scottish novelist and playwright, best remembered as the creator of Peter Pan.

Peter Pan statue (1912) by Sir George Frampton in Kensington Gardens, London

Blue plaque on 100 Bayswater Road, London where Barrie lived and wrote Peter Pan

Jack Llewelyn Davies acting in Barrie's pirate adventure, The Boy Castaways of Black Lake Island, 1901

Michael Llewelyn Davies as Peter Pan, 1906. Photo was taken by Barrie at Cudlow House in Rustington, West Sussex

Barrie’s Saint Bernard dog Porthos in 1899

Gravestone of J. M. Barrie in Kirriemuir Cemetery

There he met the Llewelyn Davies boys, who inspired him to write about a baby boy who has magical adventures in Kensington Gardens (first included in Barrie's 1902 adult novel The Little White Bird), then to write Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up, a 1904 West End "fairy play" about an ageless boy and an ordinary girl named Wendy who have adventures in the fantasy setting of Neverland.

@sohoplace

0 links

@sohoplace will be a new West End theatre due to open in Autumn 2022 and will be operated by Nimax Theatres.

Oscar Wilde

5 links

Irish poet and playwright.

Photograph by Elliott & Fry of Baker Street, London, 1881

1881 caricature in Punch, the caption reads: "O.W.", "Oh, I eel just as happy as a bright sunflower, Lays of Christy Minstrelsy, "Æsthete of Æsthetes!/What's in a name!/The Poet is Wilde/But his poetry's tame."

Wilde lectured on the "English Renaissance in Art" during his US and Canada tour in 1882.

Keller cartoon from the Wasp of San Francisco depicting Wilde on the occasion of his visit there in 1882

Caricature of Wilde in Vanity Fair, 24 April 1884

No. 34 Tite Street, Chelsea, the Wilde family home from 1884 to his arrest in 1895. In Wilde's time this was No. 16 – the houses have been renumbered.

Wilde reclining with Poems, by Napoleon Sarony in New York in 1882. Wilde often liked to appear idle, though in fact he worked hard; by the late 1880s he was a father, an editor, and a writer.

Wilde by W. & D. Downey of Ebury Street, London, 1889

Plaque commemorating the dinner between Wilde, Arthur Conan Doyle and the publisher of Lippincott's Monthly Magazine on 30 August 1889 at the Langham Hotel, London, that led to Wilde writing The Picture of Dorian Gray

Jokanaan and Salome. Illustration by Aubrey Beardsley for the 1893 edition of Salome.

Lake Windermere in northern England where Wilde began working on his first hit play, Lady Windermere's Fan (1892), during a summer visit in 1891.

St James's Theatre, London in the 1890s. The Importance of Being Earnest was Wilde's fourth West End hit in three years.

The Marquess of Queensberry's calling card with the handwritten offending inscription "For Oscar Wilde posing Somdomite [sic]". The card was marked as exhibit 'A' in Wilde's libel action.

Wilde in the dock, from The Illustrated Police News, 4 May 1895

Oscar Wilde's visiting card after his release from gaol

Oscar Wilde on his deathbed in 1900. Photograph by Maurice Gilbert.

The tomb of Oscar Wilde (surrounded by glass barrier) in Père Lachaise Cemetery

A Conversation with Oscar Wilde – a civic monument to Wilde by Maggi Hambling, on Adelaide Street, near Trafalgar Square, London. It contains the inscription, "We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars".

Oscar Wilde Memorial Sculpture in Merrion Square, Dublin

Peter Raby said these essentially English plays were well-pitched: "Wilde, with one eye on the dramatic genius of Ibsen, and the other on the commercial competition in London's West End, targeted his audience with adroit precision".

The theatre showing Magic Goes Wrong in 2022

Apollo Theatre

3 links

Souvenir of 300th performance of Véronique at the theatre in 1905

The facade in 1989, during a production of Thunderbirds FAB

The Apollo Theatre is a Grade II listed West End theatre, on Shaftesbury Avenue in the City of Westminster, in central London.

Henry Irving

2 links

Sir Henry Irving, as Hamlet, in an 1893 illustration from The Idler magazine

Caricature (by Ape) of Irving in The Bells. Vanity Fair, 19 December 1874.

Irving, 1883. Photograph by Samuel A. Walker

Plaque at St Paul's Girls' School, London

Mr. Henry Irving watching a rehearsal ca.1893

The statue of Sir Henry Irving in London, behind the National Portrait Gallery

A c. 1905–1910 portrait of Irving by R. G. Eves

Mr Burwin-Fossleton as Henry Irving. Chapter XI of The Diary of a Nobody.

Sir Henry Irving (6 February 1838 – 13 October 1905), born John Henry Brodribb, sometimes known as J. H. Irving, was an English stage actor in the Victorian era, known as an actor-manager because he took complete responsibility (supervision of sets, lighting, direction, casting, as well as playing the leading roles) for season after season at the West End’s Lyceum Theatre, establishing himself and his company as representative of English classical theatre.

Alec Guinness

3 links

English actor.

Guinness was born here, which is commemorated with a blue plaque.

Alec Guinness at the Old Vic theatre, London in 1938. Joining the company in 1936, early roles include Boyet in Love's Labour's Lost, Le Beau in As You Like It, and Osric in Hamlet.

Drawing by Nicholas Volpe after Guinness won an Oscar in 1957 for his role in The Bridge on the River Kwai

Guinness with Rita Tushingham in Doctor Zhivago (1965)

The graves of Alec and Merula in Petersfield, Hampshire

Two years later, at the age of 22, he played the role of Osric in Hamlet in the West End and joined the Old Vic.

Illustration depicting Mrs. Patrick Campbell as Eliza Doolittle

Pygmalion (play)

2 links

Play by George Bernard Shaw, named after the Greek mythological figure.

A Sketch Magazine illustration of Mrs. Patrick Campbell as Eliza Doolittle from 22 April 1914. Shaw wrote the part of Eliza expressly for Campbell, who played opposite Herbert Beerbohm Tree as Henry Higgins.

After creating the role of Col. Pickering in the London production, Philip Merivale (second from right) played Henry Higgins opposite Mrs. Patrick Campbell (right) when Pygmalion was taken to Broadway (1914)

Lynn Fontanne (Eliza) and Henry Travers (Alfred Doolittle) in the Theatre Guild production of Pygmalion (1926)

First American (serialized) publication, Everybody's Magazine, November 1914

Lynn Fontanne as Eliza Doolittle in the Theatre Guild production of Pygmalion (1926)

Julie Andrews as flower girl Eliza Doolittle meets Rex Harrison as Professor Henry Higgins in the 1956 musical adaptation of Pygmalion, My Fair Lady.

Cinematographer Harry Stradling poses with Audrey Hepburn as Eliza Doolittle on the set of the 1964 movie musical My Fair Lady.

Its English-language premiere took place at Her Majesty's Theatre in the West End in April 1914 and starred Herbert Beerbohm Tree as phonetics professor Henry Higgins and Mrs Patrick Campbell as Cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle.