It typically hosts commercial seasons of plays and smaller-scale musicals, as well as comedy and other entertainment events.

The site at the corner of Lonsdale and Stephen streets was from June 1842 to October 1854 an entertainment venue, "Rowe's American Circus", where George Benjamin William Lewis gained his foothold in Australia.

In December 1854 it was licensed as the "Royal Victoria Theatre",[3] then demolished, to be replaced by a prefabricated iron building imported from Manchester, England for George Coppin.

[6] One of Melbourne's earliest play-houses, it was the venue of some of Gustavus Vaughan Brooke's greatest triumphs, but the "Iron Pot", as it came to be known,[7] was hot in summer and cold in winter[8] and was soon displaced by architecturally superior theatres, and was abandoned in 1894.

Opened on 28 April 1928,[1] the Comedy Theatre was built and operated for fifty years by J. C. Williamson's.