Portal:Theatre

The Theatre Royal, Drury Lane is a theatre in the Covent Garden district of London, facing Catherine Street and backing onto Drury Lane. The building standing today is the most recent in a line of four theatres at the same location dating back to 1663. For its first two centuries, Drury Lane could "reasonably have claimed to be London's leading theatre" and thus one of the most important theatres in the English-speaking world. Through most of that time, it was one of a small handful of patent theatres that were granted monopoly rights to the production of "legitimate" drama in London. The first theatre on the location was built on behest of Thomas Killigrew in the early years of the English Restoration. The building that stands today opened in 1812. It has been home to actors as diverse as Shakespearean Edmund Kean, comedian Dan Leno, and musical composer and performer Ivor Novello. Today, the theatre is owned by composer Andrew Lloyd Webber and generally stages popular musical theatre. It is a Grade I listed building.

All selected articles

Read more

• November 1773 – Christoph Willibald Gluck moved to Paris and fused the Italian and French operatic styles, revolutionizing 18th-century opera
• 1 November 1611 – First recorded performance of Shakespeare's play The Tempest was held at the Palace of Whitehall in London, exactly seven years after the first certainly known performance of his tragedy Othello in the same building
• 3 November 1793 – French playwright, journalist and outspoken feminist Olympe de Gouges was guillotined for her revolutionary ideas
• 4 November 1737 – The Teatro di San Carlo in Naples, Italy, currently the oldest active opera house in Europe, was inaugurated
• 6 November 1884 – Death of William Wells Brown (pictured), widely regarded as the first published African-American playwright
• 7 November 1956 – Premiere of Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night, for which he won the 1957 Pulitzer Prize for Drama
• 16 November 1922 – John Barrymore began playing Hamlet on Broadway for 101 consecutive performances, breaking a record previously set by Edwin Booth
• 22 November 1903 – Pope Pius X ended the practice of producing castrati, replacing them with boys

Samuel Barclay Beckett (1906 - 1989) was an Irish writer, dramatist and poet. Beckett's work is stark and fundamentally minimalist. As a student, assistant, and friend of James Joyce, Beckett is considered by many one of the last modernists; as an inspiration to many later writers, he is sometimes considered one of the first postmodernists. He is also considered one of the key writers in what Martin Esslin called "Theatre of the Absurd". He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1969 "for his writing, which—in new forms for the novel and drama—in the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation". Beckett was elected Saoi of Aosdána in 1984. He died in Paris of respiratory problems.

All selected biographies

Read more

• ... that the Missoula Children's Theatre works with more than 65,000 children every year?
• ... that Alison H. Clarkson, the majority leader of the Vermont Senate, worked as a theatrical producer and on New York Theatre Workshop's board?
• ... that actress Nellie McCoy suffered a mental breakdown after her theatre performance was criticized, leading to her being committed to a sanatorium?
• ... that Lunt and Fontanne retired from Broadway after the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre was renamed after them?
• ... that Gloria Gould, the manager of New York City's Embassy Theatre, wanted an all-woman staff because women "were more efficient than men"?
• ... that in 1959, the new owner of the Coronet Theatre wanted to rename the theater after his favorite playwright, Eugene O'Neill, whose widow objected?

A playwright is a lay preacher peddling the ideas of his time in popular form. — August Strindberg

All selected quotes

More at Wikiquote

Main project

Theatre

Descendant projects

Sister projects