Shaftesbury Theatre, London. I. In Shaftesbury Avenue. This four-tiered theatre, seating 1,196, was the first to be built in the new Shaftesbury Avenue, and opened in 1888 with Forbes-Robertson as Orlando in
As You Like It, which was not a success; but E. S.
Willard did well in Henry Arthur
Jones's The Middleman (1889) and
Judah (1890). In 1898 came the long-running musical
The Belle of New York, and the first Negro musical
In Dahomey, starring Bert
Williams, was seen in 1903, and ran for 251 performances. Seasons of Grand
Guignol and revivals followed, and in 1909 Cicely
Courtneidge made her London début in Lionel Monckton's
The Arcadians under the management of her father Robert Courtneidge. In 1921 Clemence
Dane's Will Shakespeare was well received, and the theatre scored an immense success with
Tons of Money (1922) by Will
Evans and Valentine, which brought together Ralph
Lynn, Robertson
Hare, Tom
Walls, and Mary Brough (see
BROUGH, LIONEL), so laying the foundation of the future
Aldwych farces. The next year saw the London début of Fred Astaire and his sister Adèle in the musical farce
Stop Flirting, but future productions were less successful; the last was a revival of Oscar Straus's
The Chocolate Soldier (1940), and in 1941 the theatre was destroyed by bombs.2. At the Holborn end of Shaftesbury Avenue. This theatre, seating 1,300 in three tiers, was built by the Melville brothers to house their own
melodramas. It opened on 26 Dec. 1911 as the New Prince's Theatre, but the ‘New’ was soon dropped. After 1916 it had no settled policy, and its productions ranged from straight plays to ballet, pantomime, and opera. There were also revivals of
Gilbert and Sullivan during the 1920s, and distinguished foreign visitors included Sarah
Bernhardt in 1921, on her last visit to London; Diaghilev's Ballets Russes in 1921 and 1927; and Sacha
Guitry with Yvonne
Printemps in 1922. In 1924
Darlington's Alf's Button had an unexpected success. Sybil
Thorndike and Henry
Ainley were seen in
Macbeth in 1926, and in 1927 George
Robey appeared in the revue
Bits and Pieces. A year later the
Gershwin's musical comedy
Funny Face began a long run. Two dramatizations of stories by Edgar
Wallace,
The Frog (1936) and
The Gusher (1937), were popular, as were two musicals,
Wild Oats (1938) and
Sitting Pretty (1939). The theatre was badly blasted in 1940–1 but managed to stay open, and for a time housed the
Sadler's Wells ballet and opera companies. After the war the main successes were again the Gilbert and Sullivan seasons, but there were long runs of
His Excellency (1950) by Dorothy and Campbell Christie and of two American musicals,
Pal Joey (1954) and
Wonderful Town (1955). In 1962 the theatre closed for renovation, and it reopened under its present name in 1963 with another American musical,
How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying. In 1966 a farce by Philip King and Falkland Cary,
Big Bad Mouse, began a long run, and it was followed by the epoch-making American rock musical Hair (1968), which just failed to complete its 2,000th performance in 1973 owing to the collapse of the auditorium ceiling. The theatre reopened in 1974 with a revival of the musical
West Side Story. It was followed by a series of short runs which left the theatre in the doldrums until in 1980 the musical
They're Playing Our Song, written by Neil
Simon, attracted large audiences.
In 1983 the theatre was taken over by the Theatre of Comedy, which still owns it. Its first production was Ray Cooney's
Run for Your Wife, which continued its run at other theatres. The Shaftesbury later staged
Sondheim's Follies (1987) and David Henry Hwang's
M. Butterfly (1989).
