Adelphi Theatre

Adelphi Theatre, West End theatre, situated on the Strand, London. The first theatre on the site, the Sans Pareil, was built in 1806 by businessman John Scott for his daughter. The theatre initially housed revues—Miss Scott’s Entertainments—and the programme later expanded to include melodramas, again starring Miss Scott. In 1819 the theatre, under new management, was renamed the Adelphi, and the repertoire expanded to include the classics. However, the conditions of its licence did not allow the performance of straight drama, so even presentations of Shakespeare had to feature numerous musical interludes. One of the Adelphi’s earliest successes was William Moncrieff’s Tom and Jerry; or Life in London, which ran for 100 performances in 1821.

In the 1830s the Adelphi housed a number of successful adaptations of novels by Charles Dickens; it was also particularly known for staging many popular melodramas of a style that became known as “Adelphi dramas”. Offstage drama occurred in December 1897 when William Terriss, the theatre’s leading man, was killed by another actor as he arrived at the stage door for his evening performance.

The theatre was rebuilt on several occasions, in 1858, 1901 (when it was briefly renamed the Century), and 1930. C. B. Cochrane staged a number of musical productions including Ever Green (1930) by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, and during World War II a revival of The Dancing Years by Ivor Novello was hugely popular. From 1965 a production of Charlie Girl ran for over 2,000 performances. In recent years the Adelphi has continued mainly to house musicals, including A Little Night Music (1975) by Stephen Sondheim; a revival of Me and My Girl (1985) with a cast that originally included Robert Lindsay and Emma Thompson; and Sunset Boulevard by Andrew Lloyd-Webber, which premiered there in 1993.

A long-running revival of Chicago, choreographed in the style of Bob Fosse and based on the play by Maurine Dallas Watkins, opened in 1997, with an original cast of Henry Goodman, Nigel Planer, Ute Lemper, and Ruthie Henshall. The Adelphi seats 1,480.