Phoenix Theatre - London Theatre Guide

The theatre was designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, Bertie Crewe and Cecil Masey with a utilitarian exterior, but an interior designed in an Italianate style by director and designer Theodore Komisarjevsky. It opened on 24 September 1930 with the première of Private Lives by Noel Coward, who also starred with Adrienne Allen, Gertrude Lawrence and a then young Laurence Olivier. It ran for over a hundred performances before the production went to America.

The Theatre later became an unusual type of Music Hall called the Alcazar. It had three distinct stages; designed so the audience could wander from one to another. The Stage, the newspaper for actors, referred to it as being a 'Fun City' with slot machines and gambling on the ground floor and above rather dubious sounding 'exhibitions'.

Coward returned to the theatre with Tonight at 8.30 in 1936 and Quadrille in 1952. On 16 December 1969, celebrated the long association with Coward with a midnight matinee to honour of his 70th birthday, and the foyer bar became the Noel Coward Bar.

In the mid 1950s, Paul Scofield and Peter Brook appeared at the theatre. In 1968, a musical version of Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales opened and ran for around two thousand performances. Night and Day, a 1978 play by Tom Stoppard, ran for two years. The theatre hosted The Baker's Wife by Stephen Schwarz, directed by Trevor Nunn, and Into the Woods by Stephen Sondheim, starring Julia McKenzie.

The current production is Blood Brothers, a 1982 Willy Russell musical. This transferred from the Albery Theatre in 1991, and is now the longest running production at the theatre.