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The best theatres, concert halls and music venues in London: the West End houses and the playhouses that make their own work, the grand halls, the churches with a musical life, the jazz basements, the comedy clubs, the clubs proper, the rooms above pubs where things start, and the booth on Leicester Square that sells off what the West End has not. What is on is listed under each venue, and in What's On.
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What is on at them this week is in What's On: Performance
The touring musicals and the Christmas pantomime, in a 1910 house with a gilded goddess on its dome.
Off West EndPlayhousesWorth it for the building
The dome is copper gone green, and the gilded figure standing on the globe above it is Laetitia, the Roman goddess of gaiety, holding a laurel crown; almost everyone calls her the theatre's angel. She was taken down in the Second World War on the theory that she was helping German bombers find their way, and put back in 1991. Cecil Massey and Roy Young designed the building, it opened on Boxing Day 1910 with a pantomime, and it was built with a Turkish bath in the basement, which no other British theatre is known to have had.
There are 1,670 seats over three levels, more than most West End houses hold, and the programme is what a large receiving theatre does with them: touring musicals a week at a time, dance, tribute and comedy nights, and a pantomime at Christmas with a television name at the top of the bill. Oliver! opened here in 1960 and went into the West End from this stage, and Half a Sixpence did the same in 1963.
The Studio is the second room, eighty seats in what used to be the ballroom. It takes youth theatre, local companies and new writing, usually for two or three nights at a time.
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Photo by Images George Rex from London, England, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Data is compiled from public sources including OpenStreetMap, under the ODbL.