Musical Today 
London, United Kingdom
His Majesty's Theatre
1,216 seats
Photograph by AirshipJungleman29, CC BY-SA 4.0.
There has been a theatre on this corner of the Haymarket since 1705, and it began as an opera house. The present building went up in 1897, and The Phantom of the Opera has been in it since 1986 — an opera house that ended up housing a musical about one.
Inside His Majesty's Theatre
The first house here opened in 1705 with Queen Anne's permission, under the management of the architect and playwright John Vanbrugh, and it was built for opera. It kept that job for most of a century: Handel's operas, London premieres sung in Italian, singers whose names filled the Haymarket.
The present building is the fourth, put up in 1897 by the actor-manager Herbert Beerbohm Tree to house his own Shakespeare and his adaptations of novels. It has been renamed with each change of monarch — most recently in 2023, for the coronation of King Charles III — which is why a forty-year-old production has played it under two names.
The auditorium seats about 1,216. The Phantom of the Opera opened here on 9 October 1986 and is the second-longest-running production the West End has ever had, which leaves the room doing roughly what it was built for: an opera house, with an opera house on stage.
Opening dates, capacities and architects on this page come from the theatre's own history pages and from Wikipedia.
Getting there
Piccadilly Circus on the Bakerloo and Piccadilly lines is closest; Leicester Square, Charing Cross and Embankment are all within a few minutes' walk.
