Piccadilly Theatre

The Piccadilly Theatre is a West End theatre located at the junction of Denman Street and Sherwood Street, near Piccadilly Circus, in the City of Westminster, London. It opened in 1928. In its early years the theatre presented a wide range of productions, and was briefly a cinema. During the Second World War it presented productions ranging from the premiere of Noël Coward's Blithe Spirit to John Gielgud's lavish production of Macbeth. Later productions in the 1940s and 1950s included Cole Porter's Panama Hattie (1943), Coward's revue Sigh No More (1945) and Peter Ustinov's Romanoff and Juliet (1956). In 1964 the Piccadilly presented the British premiere of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, but by this time musicals had begun to outnumber non-musical plays at this theatre, with revivals of Oliver! and Man of La Mancha, and later productions including Gypsy (1973), A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1986), A Little Night Music (1989), The Rocky Horror Show (1990), Guys and Dolls (2005), Grease (2007), Jersey Boys (2014) and Moulin Rouge! (2022). The house has had more success with revivals than with premieres of musicals, and has been the scene of several new shows that closed shortly after opening. The theatre has been home to many productions of the classics, with plays by Shakespeare, Marlowe, Molière, Shaw and more modern authors including Samuel Beckett, Arthur Miller, Alan Bennett, Tom Stoppard and Willy Russell. Among the actors appearing at the Piccadilly have been Henry Fonda, Frankie Howerd, Marcel Marceau, Ian McKellen, Simon Russell Beale, Paul Scofield and Timothy West; actresses have included Gladys Cooper, Edith Evans, Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies, Joyce Grenfell, Angela Lansbury, Evelyn Laye, Prunella Scales and Julie Walters.