musical.today Manchester, United Kingdom
Manchester Opera House
1,920 seats
It has been the New Theatre, the New Queen's Theatre, the Opera House and, for five years from 1979, a bingo hall. The Palace Trust bought it back in 1984, and 1,920 seats on Quay Street now take the largest touring musicals to reach Manchester.
The building
The fifteen-bay classical front with its fluted Ionic columns is stuccoed brick under a slate roof, and it is the reason the building is listed. Howard & Wyndham bought the theatre in 1931 and brought in C. B. Cochran as a visiting producer, which is how a run of West End musicals and revues came to open in Manchester first.
Apollo Leisure took it on in 1990 and put big musicals back into it; ATG bought it in 2009 and it shares a parent company, and often a tour, with the Palace Theatre on Oxford Street.
Opening dates, capacities and architects on this page come from the theatre's own history pages and from Wikipedia.