Its red-brick facade dominates the west side of Cambridge Circus behind a small plaza near the intersection of Shaftesbury Avenue and Charing Cross Road.

Although this ran for 160 performances, followed briefly by André Messager's La Basoche, Carte had no other works ready to fill the theatre.

It was then converted into a grand music hall and renamed the Palace Theatre of Varieties, managed successfully first by Sir Augustus Harris and then by Charles Morton.

Monty Python's Spamalot played there from 2006 until January 2009, and Priscilla Queen of the Desert opened in March 2009 and closed in December 2011.

It was, as the critic Herman Klein observed, "the strangest comingling of success and failure ever chronicled in the history of British lyric enterprise!

[5] The architect Walter Emden converted the opera house into a grand and ornate music hall, which was renamed the Palace Theatre of Varieties.

[6] Harris's opening programme included a lavish and highly praised ballet, with music by Gaston Serpette;[5][7] he engaged some of the best variety turns then available,[7] before handing over the day-to-day running of the theatre to Charles Morton, known as the "Father of the Music Halls", whose biographers record: Denied permission by the London County Council to construct a promenade, which was a popular feature of adult entertainment at the Empire and Alhambra theatres,[n 1] the Palace countered with its tableaux vivants, which featured apparently nude women (though patrons were reassured that they were actually wearing flesh toned body stockings).

These films pioneered the 70 mm format which helped give an exceptionally large and clear image filling the proscenium arch.

Butt introduced many innovations, including dancers such as Maud Allan, who created something of a sensation with her Vision of Salome,[11] and Anna Pavlova, and the elegant pianist-singer Margaret Cooper.

In 1911, the Palace Girls performed a song and dance number, which was originally called Tonight but became very popular as a romantic instrumental piece In The Shadows.

[17] On 11 March 1925, the musical comedy No, No, Nanette opened at the Palace Theatre starring Binnie Hale and George Grossmith Jr.

The Palace Theatre was also the venue for Rodgers and Hart's The Girl Friend (1927) and Fred Astaire's final stage musical Gay Divorce (1933).

[28] Two exceptional runs took place at the Palace during the last decades of the 20th century: Jesus Christ Superstar (3,358 performances from 1972 to 1980) and Les Misérables, which played at the theatre for nineteen years after moving from the Barbican Centre on 4 December 1985.

"[29] After Les Misérables left the theatre in 2004, Lloyd Webber refurbished and restored the auditorium and front of the house, removing the paint that covered the onyx and Italian marble.

[31] In April 2012, Lloyd Webber's Really Useful Group sold the building to Nimax Theatres (Nica Burns and Max Weitzenhoffer).

[37] In August 2024, a double-decker bus crashed into the canopy on the side of the building; there were no injuries, and performances at the theatre are not expected to be interrupted.

[39] In the 2004 novel Full Dark House, by Christopher Fowler, a series of gruesome murders take place in the Palace during the London Blitz amid a production of Orpheus in the Underworld.