Palace Theatre

Palace Theatre, West End theatre, situated on Shaftesbury Avenue, London. The Palace Theatre was built in 1891 for Richard D’Oyly Carte and was originally named the Royal English Opera House. D’Oyly Carte had intended the theatre to be used to present and promote operatic works by British composers, but other than its opening production, Ivanhoe by Arthur Sullivan in 1891, no such work was offered. Instead, the actress Sarah Bernhardt performed there for a season that year. The theatre became a music-hall venue the following year and was renamed the Palace Theatre of Varieties, becoming simply the Palace Theatre in 1911, the year in which it hosted the first-ever Royal Variety Show. It continued to house variety shows and revues, together with the occasional musical, for many years.

In 1957 Laurence Olivier performed there in The Entertainer by John Osborne, but for most of the 1950s and 1960s the Palace presented musicals: notable British premieres presented there included a successful six-year run of The Sound of Music by Rodgers and Hammerstein (1961); Cabaret starring Judi Dench (1968); the eight-year opening run of Jesus Christ Superstar by Andrew Lloyd Webber (1972); and, from 1985, a long run of Les Misérables which by 2000 had amassed over 6,000 performances. The theatre building is in a grand Victorian style that impressed John Betjeman to the extent that he once claimed it was the only London theatre for 60 years with architecture that “climbs into the regions of a work of art”. The auditorium seats around 1,450.