musical.today Edinburgh, United Kingdom
Edinburgh Playhouse
3,059 seats
The largest theatre in Scotland and the second largest in the United Kingdom. It opened in 1929 as a super-cinema modelled on the Roxy in New York, closed in the early 1970s, and was saved from demolition by a petition of fifteen thousand signatures.
The building
Fairweather specialised in cinemas — Green's Playhouse in Glasgow was his — and built this one for an audience that filled it nightly for forty years. When it closed, the listing that followed the 1974 campaign is the only reason the building is still on Greenside.
Lothian Region's architects converted it into a theatre between 1978 and 1980. It has passed through five owners since the council sold it in 1983, and it is now the room in Scotland that takes the shows too big for anywhere else.
Opening dates, capacities and architects on this page come from the theatre's own history pages and from Wikipedia.