Daly's Theatre
After Edwardes died in 1915 Daly's had one more great hit, The Maid of the Mountains (1917), which ran for 1,352 productions, but after that the fortunes of the theatre declined; Noël Coward's play Sirocco (1927) was a notable failure.
[4] After the conclusion of Daly's season the theatre presented the British premiere of Alfred, Lord Tennyson's The Foresters, which was not well received and closed after three weeks.
[5] After this the theatre was occupied by two visiting European companies, those of Eleonora Duse, playing La Dame aux camélias in Italian, and Sarah Bernhardt in a French season.
[6] In September 1894 Edwardes presented A Gaiety Girl, transferring from the Prince of Wales Theatre, and in December the Carl Rosa Opera Company gave the British premiere of Humperdinck's Hansel and Gretel.
[9] The latter had not been professionally staged in London since 1841, and despite respectful reviews and a starry cast including Rehan, Lewis, Tyrone Power, Frank Worthing and Maxine Elliott, it did not attract the public.
[10] The production of A Midsummer Night's Dream that followed did better,[11] but as the theatre historians Mander and Mitchenson put it, "London had not responded to the Americanised classics as Daly had hoped.
[4] In the first decade of the 20th century Edwardes's first new production at Daly's was A Country Girl (1902), with music by Lionel Monckton and Paul Rubens and words by Adrian Ross, Percy Greenbank and James T. Tanner, which ran for 729 performances.
[4] Between the end of the run of The Merry Widow and the First World War Edwardes staged four more new shows, all English adaptations of continental operettas: Leo Fall's The Dollar Princess (1909), Lehár's The Count of Luxembourg (1911), and Gipsy Love (1912) – all with English words by Hood and Ross, and in 1913 Victor Jacobi's The Marriage Market in an adaptation by Gladys Unger, Arthur Anderson and Ross.
[4] It was followed by A Southern Maid (1920) with music by Fraser-Simpson and Ivor Novello, which ran for 306 performances, and then Sybil, by Jacobi and Harry Graham, which had a similar run.
The Lady of the Rose (Jean Gilbert, 1922), Madame Pompadour (Fall, 1923) and Cleopatra (Oscar Straus, 1925), all starring Evelyn Laye, were well reviewed.
[19] In 1927 the theatre's policy of presenting musicals was briefly and disastrously abandoned in favour of Noël Coward's play Sirocco, which according to Mander and Mitchenson was a failure so abject as to have passed into stage history.
Seymour Hicks succeeded Welchman in 1933, and under his management That's a Pretty Thing played in 1933, Charley's Aunt was revived in 1934, and Young England was transferred there in 1935.
Stone with a marble facade sculpted by Bainbridge Copnall, featuring a large relief panel in two corners depicting the spirits of sight and sound.
