Venue: Lyric Theatre
Address: 29 Shaftesbury Avenue, London, Westminster, W1D 7ES, England
Town: London, GB

The Lyric Theatre is a West End theatre in Shaftesbury Avenue in the City of Westminster. It was built for the producer Henry Leslie, who financed it from the profits of the light opera hit, Dorothy, which he transferred from its original venue to open the new theatre on 17 December 1888. Under Leslie and his early successors the house specialised in musical theatre, and that tradition has continued intermittently throughout the theatre's existence. Musical productions in the theatre's first four decades included The Mountebanks (1892), His Excellency (1894), The Duchess of Dantzig (1903), The Chocolate Soldier (1910) and Lilac Time (1922). Later musical shows included Irma La Douce (1958), Robert and Elizabeth (1964), John, Paul, George, Ringo... and Bert (1974), Blood Brothers (1983), Five Guys Named Moe (1990) and Thriller - Live (2009). Many non-musical productions have been staged at the Lyric, from Shakespeare to O'Neill and Strindberg, as well as new pieces by Noël Coward, Terence Rattigan, Alan Ayckbourn, Alan Bennett and others. Stars appearing at the theatre included, in the early years, Marie Tempest, Johnston Forbes-Robertson, Eleonora Duse, Ellen Terry and Tallulah Bankhead, and in the mid-20th-century Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, Laurence Olivier, Ralph Richardson and Vivien Leigh. More recently Alec Guinness, Joan Plowright, Glenda Jackson, John Malkovich, Woody Harrelson and Ian McKellen have starred. In a 2017 survey of London's theatres, Michael Coveney observes that the 1880s marked the beginning of "a building boom … that signals the true making of the West End". The Lyric was one of twelve new or wholly rebuilt theatres of that decade. It was the second theatre to be constructed in Shaftesbury Avenue and is the oldest still surviving. It was commissioned by the producer Henry Leslie with profits from the Alfred Cellier and B. C. Stephenson hit, Dorothy; Leslie was said to have made £100,000 from the show. The architect was C. J. Phipps, who al