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.