page_title: Palace Theatre, London
section_title: 20th century
hierarchical_section_title: Palace Theatre, London / History / 20th century
caption_attribution_description: palace theatre. Taken by C Ford march 04.
context_page_description: The Palace Theatre is a West End theatre in the City of Westminster in London. Its red-brick facade dominates the west side of Cambridge Circus behind a small plaza near the intersection of Shaftesbury Avenue and Charing Cross Road. The Palace Theatre seats 1,400.
  Richard D'Oyly Carte, producer of the Gilbert and Sullivan operas, commissioned the theatre in the late 1880s. It was designed by Thomas Edward Collcutt and intended to be a home of English grand opera. The theatre opened as the Royal English Opera House in January 1891 with a lavish production of Arthur Sullivan's opera Ivanhoe. Although this ran for 160 performances, followed briefly by André Messager's La Basoche, Carte had no other works ready to fill the theatre. He leased it to Sarah Bernhardt for a season and sold the opera house within a year at a loss. It was then converted into a grand music hall and renamed the Palace Theatre of Varieties, managed successfully first by Sir Augustus Harris and then by Charles Morton. In 1897, the theatre began to screen films as part of its programme of entertainment.
context_section_description: In 1904, Morton was succeeded as manager by his deputy, Alfred Butt. Butt introduced many innovations, including dancers such as Maud Allan, who created something of a sensation with her Vision of Salome, and Anna Pavlova, and the elegant pianist-singer Margaret Cooper. Oliver G Pike premièred his first film, In Birdland, at the theatre in August 1907.  This was the first British wildlife film to be screened to a paying audience.  On 26 February 1909, the general public first saw Kinemacolor in a programme of 21 short films shown at the theatre.
  The name of the theatre was finally changed to The Palace Theatre in 1911.  Herman Finck was musical director from 1900 until 1920, and made many recordings with the theatre's orchestra.  The theatre was famous not only for its orchestra, but also for the beautiful Palace Girls, for whom Finck composed many dances. In 1911, the Palace Girls performed a song and dance number, which was originally called Tonight but became very popular as a romantic instrumental piece In The Shadows.  In 1912, the theatre hosted the first Royal Variety Performance in Britain, commanded by King George V, and produced by Butt. During the First World War, the theatre presented revues, and Maurice Chevalier became known to British audiences. After the war, the theatre was used mostly for films for a few years, but the Marx Brothers appeared at the theatre in 1922, performing selections from their Broadway shows.
  On 11 March 1925, the musical comedy No, No, Nanette opened at the Palace Theatre starring Binnie Hale and George Grossmith, Jr.  The run of 665 performances made it the third longest-running West End musical of the 1920s.  Princess Charming ran for 362 performances beginning in 1926.  The Palace Theatre was also the venue for Rodgers and Hart's The Girl Friend (1927) and Fred Astaire's final stage musical Gay Divorce (1933). The theatre was twice threatened with demolition in the early 1930s; offers of £400,000 and £450,000 were made for the site: one offer was from an American chain which proposed to build a department store on the site, but the directors, led by C. B. Cochran refused to sell.
  In 1939–1940, Cicely Courtneidge and Jack Hulbert appeared at the Palace in Under Your Hat, a spy story co-written by Hulbert, with music and lyrics by Vivian Ellis, which ran for 512 performances. Later musical theatre works that played with success at the theatre included Song of Norway (1946, 525 performances), King's Rhapsody (1949, 841 performances), Where's Charley? (1958, 380 performances),  and Flower Drum Song (1960) among others.  The Entertainer, starring Laurence Olivier, transferred to the theatre from the Royal Court Theatre in 1957. In the 1960s, The Sound of Music ran for 2,386 performances, from 1961, and Cabaret followed in 1968 (336 performances). The Danny La Rue revue Danny at the Palace (1970) ran for 811 performances.
  Two exceptional runs took place at the Palace during the last decades of the 20th century: Jesus Christ Superstar (3,358 performances from 1972 to 1980) and Les Misérables, which played at the theatre for nineteen years after moving from the Barbican Centre on 4 December 1985. The production moved to the Queen's Theatre on April 2004 to continue its record-setting run.  In between, Song and Dance played from 1982 to 1984.  In 1983, Andrew Lloyd Webber purchased the theatre for £1.3 million and began a series of renovations to the auditorium, including uncovering the famous marble and onyx panels lurking below a layer of paint.  He restored the theatre's facade, later commenting: "I removed the huge neon sign that defaced the glorious terracotta exterior, much to the chagrin of West End producers who told me I had removed the greatest theatre advertising sight in London."
caption: Les Misérables played at the Palace Theatre from 1985 to 2004
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