musical.today Newcastle, United Kingdom
Newcastle Theatre Royal
1,249 seats
Grade I listed, which almost no working theatre is, and the centrepiece of Richard Grainger's Grey Street. It opened in 1837 with The Merchant of Venice; a fire after a performance of Macbeth in 1899 gutted the inside, and what audiences sit in now is Frank Matcham's replacement, finished on the last day of 1901.
The building
The Greens designed it as part of Grainger's rebuilding of central Newcastle, and the portico halfway up Grey Street is the reason the street keeps turning up in lists of the finest in England.
Fire took the interior in 1899. Matcham — the most prolific theatre architect of the period, and the name behind half the houses on this tour — rebuilt it behind the surviving front, and it reopened on 31 December 1901 with the auditorium of four levels and 1,249 seats that is there today.
Opening dates, capacities and architects on this page come from the theatre's own history pages and from Wikipedia.