The venue often plays host to dance performances, conferences, ballet, pop concerts and award ceremonies.

Mrs Hughes became the first (identified) woman to tread the boards of a London theatre, on 8 December 1660, in a performance of Othello.

The Stage Year Book commented, "Londoners have practically no curiosity concerning operatic novelties or fresh artists, and they have never shown any predilection for the works of Massenet, on whom Mr Hammerstein so greatly relied".

[2] Hammerstein could not secure the artists and operas most popular in London as the Royal Covent Garden Syndicate was able to do, and as his prices were the same as those of the rival company, operagoers mostly favoured the older house.

[2] He leased the theatre – described by The Stage Year Book as "a monument of misdirected energy ... hopeless from its inception" – to a French producer who reopened it as a variety house.

Rosing presented the English premiere of Tchaikovsky's The Queen of Spades and introduced Tamaki Miura as Madama Butterfly, the first Japanese singer to be cast in that role.

The London transfer of a version of George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess that restored it to an operatic form, took place here on 9 October 1952.

[8] Later in 1961 MGM leased the theatre to continue the run of the film Ben Hur[9] following closure of the Empire, Leicester Square for rebuilding.

The house is now shared between the London School of Economics (during the day) and Sadler's Wells evening dance productions.

An urban myth has grown up that, during one of Paul Raymond's revues at the theatre in the 1970s, a dolphin was kept in a tank beneath the stage, where it lived permanently and later died from neglect.

[13] The remnants of the tank and its lifting equipment still remain below the stage and numerous visitors to the theatre claim to have heard in the vicinity a spectral squeaking, not unlike a crying baby.

One possible explanation is that the London Underground Piccadilly line Aldwych spur used to pass very close to the sub-stage areas of the theatre and it is noise from the tunnels that created the sound.