Prince Edward Theatre

How to win at theatre:
1) Stop by in the morning
2) Ask for day-​of tickets
3) Pull out wallet
4) Hand over £20 for front row, orchestra Miss Saigon tickets
5) Attend show
6) Feel like a winner
Rinse and repeat.

This is a truly beautiful theatre. I’ve walked past it many many times and had no idea quite how huge it was until I entered. The architecture is really quite stunning and it seems almost slightly art deco, perhaps straight out of the late 1920s. There’s more room in the seats than many other theatres and the view from the stalls is great. It’s a really large theatre and it does feel very large. It’s certainly not a small intimate theatre like the Adelphi but I think it works, at least for Miss Saigon!

Watched Miss Saigon here at the theatre. The décor is stunning with red velvety chairs. The balcony boxes look very fancy. The service was mediocre, very small lobby area. They do serve snacks and drinks in the lobby. During intermission staff come in the hallway to sell snacks like water and ice cream. The seating was comfortable. The audio was loud and good quality.
They do allow pictures to be taken before the show and during intermission (unlike some toronto shows where no photography is allowed whatsoever)

The Prince Edward theatre was designed in 1930 by Edward A. Stone. The interior was designed by Marc-​Henri Levy and Gaston Laverdet. It was named after Prince Edward (then the Prince of Wales, briefly Edward VIII and later Duke of Windsor).
I remember first coming here as a child when it was the Casino Cinerama Theatre. It reverted to being a theatre in 1978 with the world première of Evita. It also changed its name back to Prince Edward theatre.
I’ve seen many productions here. I saw Jersey Boys here from the stalls, and recently Miss Saigon from the Dress Circle. It wasn’t until I sat in the Dress Circle, that I could appreciate how beautiful the auditorium is, with a real art deco feel. I don’t know when the theatre had its last make over, but it is stunning, both internally and externally. Externally, there is minimal hording, exposing the detail of the architecture. They have also installed huge up lighting lamps, which really make the building a landmark on Compton Street, in Soho. Internally the detail is again stunning, with rich reds, purples and effective lighting to maximize that appearance of the theatre. The seats are very comfortable with ample leg room. Unusually for a West End theatre, the toilets have been refitted with plenty of facilities. This means that you are not spending the whole interval queuing to use them, rather than enjoying a drink at the bar.
I used the Dress Circle bar before the performance and during the interval. It has to be the best theatre bar in the West End. It was not too crowded (this could also have something to do with the prices). What makes it stand out above other theatre bars, the external terrace they have created above the canopy entrance to the theatre. From here you can take in all atmosphere of Compton Street, and Soho.
Theatre prices in the West End are not cheap. It’s great to see that this theatre has invested in making the theatre going experience, and occasion for its audience.

Perfect theatre. We saw Miss Saigon and our seats in the back were excellent. Of course the helicopter scene was the highlight. Kudos to the theatre staff who recovered my GF’s mobile phone she lost the night of the show and had it for us the next day. Great work!

A beautiful theatre, very clean and comfortable. The Grand circle seats are perfect, so I couldn’t imagine how great the Lower seats must have been !
Many great restaurants in the area, too…

Great theater, not a bad seat in the house! Saw Jersey Boys and it was amazing, nothing like London Theater, just brilliant!

This small theater was a very nice venue. Many of the theaters in London are small, and that is one of the things we like about them; they are very intimate and you are able to get a better feel for the play and actors on stage. Was here years ago and saw «Mary Poppins» with a tour group of about 15. Thoroughly enjoyed the play and the theater. We were lucky enough to get a tour of the back stage after the play and it really added a nice touch to the whole event.

We ended up getting last-​minute half-​price tickets to see Jersey Boys (thanks to Tom (??) in the Covent Garden discount booth).
Our seats were FANTASTIC, the theater is beautiful and the show was phenomenal.
BUT — £3 for the teeniest cup of Haagen Dasz ice cream? I don’t think so! Everyone else was buying them like they were going out of style, but they were seriously ridiculously teeny. And £3, for those who don’t know, is currently $ 4.84! Not cool.

This is one of the nicest theaters I’ve seen here in London. I saw Jersey Boys here and it was a very good production of it. I was all the way up on the grand circle and although you have to be looking down the whole time (which is true for any 3^rd-​tier seating/​balcony) we still had really good views. The great thing about Jersey Boys is that they barely stage anything upstage so even from the sides, you’d get a pretty good view.
I would still say that the first few rows of the dress circle are still the best seats in this theater. Though really, they are usually the best seats of any theater.
Anyway, I highly recommend this theater as it seems that you’d have good views from any seat really (except for the extreme sides/​boxes).

Good venue. Jersey Boys was well done.
I had Loge seating, def the seats in the house.

Hands down the best theatre I have ever experienced! I was in town for business and hadn’t been planning on seeing a show but that lovely thing called fate jumped in.
I happened to be meeting with a vendor, whose daughter happened to be working at Prince Edward Theatre and after asking me if I like the theatre (to which I responded ‚“Do I love theatre!!!) he offered me a chance to see «Jersey Boys.» I would have been silly to say no, so on my last evening in town, I found myself in front of the Prince Edward Theatre by myself starring at the marquee in awe that I had somehow scored a ticket to a real live London Show.
I go in and get swept up by a sea of red velvet and I meet my vendor’s daughter. She hands me a ticket and directs me to a door. As I enter, I am stunned. I couldn’t be this close to the stage could I? I kept showing people my ticket and as I get closer and closer to the stage, I find myself being more and more excited. This is too good to be true I think.
With my ticket in hand, I find myself in row 2, directly in the middle of the stage. After having one of those «holy shit» moments, I sat down and there was an older man and woman sitting next to me. The woman smiled and started chatting with me. Turned out she was in town to see her son who was starring in the play. All the sudden I am getting back story about the play and this woman’s son.
As the woman told me her story, I sat in wonder, staring at the elegant surroundings (think more red velvet!). In addition to having the best seat of my life, I quickly discovered I was seeing the best show of my life too! You just have to see «Jersey Boys» in London. It was so amazingly fun and so amazingly performed that by the time it ended I couldn’t even process my experience.
As I was standing in front of the theatre after the show, waiting for my cab to pick me up, the actors from the show came out and a million screaming girls flooded them. I was able to see each of these actors up close and personal. Talk about icing on the cake. Anyways, if you are ever in London you just have to see a show at the Prince Edward Theatre. You will be amazed!

I went to this theatre as a treat for my birthday to see Jersey Boys. It’s a beautiful old theatre tucked away in Old Compton Street, but it is really well looked after. There was plenty of leg room and unlike some theatres, it was comfortable.
As for Jersey Boys, well I can only say that it was brilliant, fantastic, marvellous, fun, etc. The story and the music was excellent and I can’t wait to go again!

I saw Mary Poppins here when I was in London. My travel mates were celebrating their anniversary so I decided to try and get a ticket to see a show. I called the theater directly and asked if they had any seats available. They did so I bought a ticket and had it saved at will call.
I gave myself extra time to get to the theater, worried that I would get lost venturing through London all by myself. It was really easy to find the theater from the underground. It is also in a good location where you get to walk by a number of other theaters, see what shows are currently playing, and consider spending the rest of your visit trying to see as many shows as possible. (I didn’t.)
I got to the theater, picked up my ticket, and made my way to my seat. Going to the theater by yourself has some perks, I got a seat that was dead center — in between two groups of very nice people who talked just like the people in Mary Poppins. Bonus!
The theater is beautiful. The show was amazing and the theater really helped to maintain the ambiance. My most favorite thing? You can buy ice cream during intermission. Yes, ice cream! I didn’t think that musicals could get any better… and then they did!

We came here spontaneously after work one day to watch Jersey Boys. So we decided to drop by here and see if they had student tickets, no big deal if they didn’t.
So my friend and I ended up getting some Chinese food from a takeaway place off Tottenham Ct Road and he was still eating out of the box so I went inside to get tickets. We both had an ISIC card (hurrah for that) and asked if they had £25 tickets available still. He told us he did and that he asked us if we wanted BOX SEATS! Umm BINGO!
Box seats w/​a student discount… SCORE!
I really liked the theatre too, it was really cute and the red and gold colour was a definite go.
Also THE BEST show I’ve seen. (Pretty close with Wicked). It’s such a high energy performance and we were all dancing and singing along to the Temptations songs they performed. Oh man, it was amazing.
We also sat next to this Australian woman who happened to be a judge. She was so cute and was saying how excited she was because this was the kind of music she grew up with. Oh man, I can’t wait for the day when musicals will be able 50 cent or the story of Britney Spears — THAT is something I can’t wait to see!!!

We watched Mary Poppins here and it was not the Disney version I am familiar with. It was a darker, scarier version and Mary Poppins was kind of mean. Some of the songs were the same though. The theater is really old and kinda ratty. And we started calling the London kids «Dudley“s since they’re mostly all spoiled, whiny and chubby. No pictures allowed and the concession stand was expensive (like everything else in London). We got the tickets through the box office earlier in the day and it was about $ 80. Near the theater are a lot of pubs (where the best food is — London has terrible food).

A cute theatre, but a little too small.
I went to one of the final-​run showing of Mary Poppins and was shocked to find the local folk dressed in jeans and T-​shirts. People get more dressed up for theatre down where I’m from in Orlando ;)
Overall, the facilities were nice. I really enjoyed the proximity to SoHo and the other fun things to do in that area :)

A child hood memory — and here the proper revival. More in detail and depth could the Mary Poppins musical not be!
I was so looking forward to it, always studying the billboards coming up the escalator on the tube. And there is was — excited — the show can begin…
My favourite scene was by far the chimney dance, its just fantastic and has an unbelievable wit. Also Mary Poppins can fly for real — I enjoyed it as much as my little cousins. We laughed!
There was one scary scene, when the toys started dancing in the bedrooms — cool costumes though.
The end is an never ending crescendo of singing and special effects — even though the end part was layed out a little bit different.
It was nice to dive into my childhood memories of the past.

Jersey Boys is on at the Prince Edward Theatre now, since March 2008. I went last week and have to say it is excellent! In these current gloomy times, this will really give you a feel good feeling and lift you/​your party out of todays dreariness.
The music is fantastic — I didn’t realise how many songs were written by Franki Valli. when they sang Bye Bye Baby (as I knew it from the Bay City Rollers) I was very shocked!
The actors are fantastic — their voices are so good and Frank Valli himself is so cute and his voice pitch perfect!
Highly recommended!

The Prince Edward Theatre is a beautiful place, old but still well kept. With its gold and red seats, there is plenty of foot room, and you can see most of the action from the majority of the theatre. There are so many exits no one gets crowded on leaving.
The stage production of Mary Poppins is finishing on January 12, so the rest of the UK can enjoy such a marvelous story, but do go and see it beforehand if you can. Mary Poppins weaves her magic for all the children with many special effects, new songs and dances and a good dose of Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious!
But in February ‘Jersey Boys’ will take over the theatre, the musical story of Frankie Vallie and the Four Seasons.

So wie man hier zu Lande vielleicht gern öfters mal ins Kino geht oder mit seinen Kleinen in den Zoo, pflegen Engländer ihre spezielle Musical-​Kultur. So ist es nicht unüblich, dass man besonders Familien mit kleinen Kindern noch spät abends in bestimmten Theatern sitzen sieht. Oder dass sich Jugendliche mit einem BigMäc-​Menü auf dem Schoß zu Starlight Express amüsieren. Die Musical Theatre, wie auch das Prince Edward Theatre eins ist, sind meistens schon sowohl von außen, aber besonders von innen eine Augenweide. Das 1930 erbaute Prince Edward Theatre bietet ca. 1600 Zuschauern auf den verschiedensten rot & golden verkleideten und wunderbar beleuchteten Rängen Platz. Seine bewegte Geschichte reicht vom Kabarett-​Restaurant namens London Casino in den 30ern über einen Unterhaltungsclub für Militärangehörige namens Queensberry All Services Club in den 40ern bishin zum Kino namens Castino Cinerama Theatre in den 50ern. Ende der 70er bekam das Theater nach einem erneuten Umbau seinen ursprünglichen Namen zurück und war Uraufführungsstätte des Musicals «Evita». Es folgten Chess, Anything Goes, Crazy For You, Martin Guerre und Mamma Mia! Seit 2004 können Leute aus aller Welt die bezaubernde Aufführung von Mary Poppins im Prince Edward Theatre erleben. Wegen der großen Beliebtheit sollte man sich schon vornweg Karten bestellen. In den Pausen kann man sich mit allerlei Getränken oder Eis erfrischen. Das Fotografieren sollte man tunlichst vermeiden, da Fotogeräte sofort eingezogen werden. Ansonsten kann ich das Theatre und das derzeitige Musical Mary Poppins nur jedem empfehlen. Die Show ist wunderbar unterhaltsam & mitreißend und allein das atemberaubend grandiose Bühnenbild ist jeden Penny Eintritt wert.