Palace Theatre - History
The Palace Theatre is one of many London theatres that can be found on Shaftesbury Avenue in the capital. This makes its nearest underground stations both Tottenham Court Road and Leicester Square. The closest railway station can be found at Charing Cross.
Walking down the West Side of Cambridge Circus, it would be hard to miss the impressive red brick building that makes up the Palace Theatre, with its impressive windows that climb up an imposing wall. This grand theatre, which originates from the 1880s has an impressive history that sees its routes as The Royal English Opera, with a façade that would still be recognised today by someone of the time. This is true right down to the original brick that was laid by Helen Carte, wife of the theatre’s commissioner Richard D’Oyly Carte.
Richard D’Oyly Carte had desired a home of Enlgish grand opera, hoping to create a venue that would complement his own Savoy Theatre, which itself had been built as a home for light opera. The design began in the 1880s and finally opened under the banner The Royal English Opera House in 1891. The theatre’s proud history began with a production of The Arthur Sullivan classic Ivanhoe, which went on to entertain the crowds of the time for 160 performances. Then an unusual event occurred – when Ivanhoe closed its curtains for the final time there was no new show on the schedule to replace it. As a result, this new London venue that could have been a home for English Opera for many years was forced to close until later in the year. People at the time have remarked that this could have had a striking effect on London Theatre, meaning the face of the capital’s culture could be very different had this not occurred.
But the theatre did not shut down for good, re-emerging in the November of that year with Andre Messager’s La Basoche. However history was very quick to repeat itself and once again the schedule was empty come the end of that production’s run. So the theatre was leased elsewhere and eventually sold off to new owners then subsequently renamed The Palace Theatre of Varieties, keeping this title until the twentieth century.
It was 1911 when the venue received the title it would keep to this day. At the time Herman Finck was the music director, making the theatre famous for its popular orchestra and its Palace Girls, a group of dancers for which Finck composed work. This saw the theatre through the next nine years, right through the Great War.
As time progressed, the variety of shows that happened upon the Palace Theatre’s stage were vast and varied, ranging from 1925’s No, No, Nanette to 1927’s The Girl Friend. Then later, from 1961, The Sound of Music played for an extended run of over 2000 performances. By the time the eighties had arrived there had been a number of shows that had proved successful and in 1983 Andrew Lloyd Webber emerged as the new owner of the freehold of the theatre. It was Webber who would bring to the theatre many shows that would go down in history as part of popular culture, including 2004’s The Woman in White and then 2006’s Whistle Down The Wind.
Today, the theatre is still proving popular with shows such as Monty Python’s Spamalot gracing its historic stage.
