History
The theatre's first big hit was The Belle of New York produced by the prominent Broadway producer, George W. Lederer, which opened on 12 April 1898 and ran for an extremely successful 697 performances. In 1908–9 H. B. Irving became the lessee and manager of the theatre and presented a successful season of plays. Robert Courtneidge was lessee for most of the early years of the 20th century and produced mostly comic operas and Edwardian musical comedies, including Tom Jones (1907), the record-setting hit The Arcadians (1909), Oh! Oh! Delphine! (1913), The Pearl Girl and many others. In 1914 Basil Rathbone appeared at the Shaftesbury as the Dauphin in Shakespeare's Henry V.
Courtneidge's successors, from 1917 to 1921 were George Grossmith, Jr. and Edward Laurillard. The produced a number of shows, including Arlette by Claude M. Ronald and L. Bouvet (1917); Baby Bunting by Fred Thompson and Worton David (1919); The Great Lover, by Leo Ditrichstein, Frederic Hatton, and Fanny Hatton (1920); and Out to Win, by Roland Pertwee and Dion Clayton Calthrop (1921).
In 1941 the theatre was so severely damaged by aerial bombardment that the lease was vacated, and in 1956 the site was appropriated by the London County Council for use as a fire station. It is at present used as a car park and for advertising purposes.
Read more about this topic: Original Shaftesbury Theatre
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“In the history of the United States, there is no continuity at all. You can cut through it anywhere and nothing on this side of the cut has anything to do with anything on the other side.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)
“He wrote in prison, not a History of the World, like Raleigh, but an American book which I think will live longer than that. I do not know of such words, uttered under such circumstances, and so copiously withal, in Roman or English or any history.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The history of all Magazines shows plainly that those which have attained celebrity were indebted for it to articles similar in natureto Berenice—although, I grant you, far superior in style and execution. I say similar in nature. You ask me in what does this nature consist? In the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque: the fearful coloured into the horrible: the witty exaggerated into the burlesque: the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)