Prince of Wales Theatre

Prince of Wales Theatre, London, in Coventry Street. (The name is also found on playbills and programmes as Prince of Wales' and Prince of Wales's.) It opened as the Prince's Theatre in 1884, and on 3 Mar. a free adaptation of Ibsen's A Doll's House (as Breaking a Butterfly) was produced, but aroused little interest. It was followed by The Private Secretary, a German play adapted by Hawtrey, which was not at first a success but when transferred to the Globe had a long run. The first successful production at the Prince of Wales, as it was renamed in 1886, was the wordless play L'Enfant prodigue (1891), superbly mimed, which served to introduce Pierrot to London in something other than pantomime. In Town, often considered the first English musical comedy, was presented here by George Edwardes in 1892, and was followed by the equally successful A Gaiety Girl (1893). The theatre moved over to straight plays with Forbes-Robertson and Mrs Patrick Campbell in Maeterlinck's Pelléas and Mélisande and Martin-Harvey in Wills's adaptation of Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities as The Only Way, transferred from the Lyceum. Marie Tempest appeared as Nell Gwynn (1900) and Becky Sharp (1901), but the theatre returned to musical comedy between 1903 and 1910, including Miss Hook of Holland (1907) and The King of Cadonia (1908). For the next two decades it housed musicals, plays such as Ivor Novello's The Rat (1924), and revues including Co-Optimists (1923) and Charlot's Revue (1924). During much of the 1930s the theatre was given over to non-stop revue, and when Encore les dames closed in 1937 the building was demolished. A new theatre under the old name, seating 1,139 in two tiers, opened in 1937 with Les Folies de Paris et Londres. In 1943 Sid Field made his London début here in Strike a New Note, and he returned to star in Piccadilly Hayride (1946). Three years later he also starred in Mary Chase's comedy about an imaginary rabbit, Harvey, which had a long run, as did Paul Osborn's The World of Susie Wong (1959) and Neil Simon's Come Blow Your Horn (1962), while Funny Girl (1966) with Barbra Streisand, Sweet Charity (1967), and Promises, Promises (1969) brought to London three successful Broadway musicals. Later long-running shows were Bernard Slade's Same Time, Next Year (1976), Ayckbourn's Bedroom Farce (1978), and a revival of the musical Guys and Dolls in 1985, the last two both transferred from the National Theatre. Rodgers and Hammerstein's musical South Pacific was successfully revived in 1988, and Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical Aspects of Love began a long run in 1989.

The Scala, under the Bancrofts, was also known as the Prince of Wales's.