More About the Prince Edward Theatre

This is a 1930 building and the Art Deco auditorium is still the one you walk into, in fuchsia and gold, drawn by Edward Stone with the interior by Marc Henri and Laverdet.

Two bits of its past still affect what you can book.

The side Boxes are not original. Delfont Mackintosh enlarged the stage and remodelled the auditorium in 1992 and put them in then. That is why a theatre from 1930 has ten Loges to sell, and why they are the best side seats in the building rather than an afterthought bolted to a Victorian wall.

And for twenty years it was not a theatre at all. From 1954 it was converted for Cinerama and ran as a cinema until 1974, which is the gap in the production history below.

How it got here, briefly

Opened 3 April 1930 with Rio Rita. Josephine Baker played a season in 1933. It became the London Casino, a cabaret restaurant, in 1936, and the Queensberry All Services Club through the war, broadcasting Variety Band Box to the forces every Sunday with Vera Lynn, Glenn Miller and George Formby on it. The Latin Quarter revues ran from 1949, greeting audiences with one band in the foyer, a second on stage and a third in the pit. A 1953 show put a filled swimming pool on the stage. Then the cinema years, and back to theatre on 21 June 1978 with Evita, which ran until 1986.

Who runs it

Delfont Mackintosh Theatres. They run eight West End theatres, and one Box Office on Shaftesbury Avenue sells for all of them.

Past productions

• Mamma Mia!, from 1999. Five years here before it moved to the Prince of Wales and later the Novello
• Mary Poppins, from 2004. The first stage version of it anywhere, and it played over 1,000 performances
• Jersey Boys, from 2008. It took the 2009 Olivier Award for Best New Musical
• Miss Saigon, 2014. The production that brings it back to this stage in May 2027
• Disney's Aladdin, from 2016
• Mary Poppins, again, from 2019
• Dear England, October 2023 to January 2024. James Graham's play about Gareth Southgate and the England men's team, with Joseph Fiennes, transferred from the National Theatre for fourteen weeks. Almost the only straight play this stage has taken in decades

Other venues of similar size

• Victoria Palace Theatre, 1,557 seats over three levels, the closest thing to a match for the shape of this building
• Adelphi Theatre, around 1,480 over three levels, another big musical theatre a few streets away