News
Published on 21 May 2026
After Puritan-led Parliament’s infamous ban on public theater, it took eighteen years before playhouses in London were up and running again. The return of King Charles II in 1660 brought more than monarchy back to the city; it revived theater too. Charles’s royal support, however, was far from enough to completely insulate the London Stage from future attacks like that of Parliament.
Even after years of its reinstatement, the playhouse faced repeated allegations of impropriety. On May 21st, at the turn of the (18th) century, London newspaper The Flying Post reported on one such attack: reporting that the Grand Jury of London had officially made arguments against the public “frequenting the Play-houses.”
View of the Sessions House in the Old Bailey, by unknown author, 1772. Licensed from The Trustees of the British Museum, under a a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 License
The Jury gathered at the primary criminal courthouse of London, the Old... Read More
Published on 18 May 2026
The LSDB website will be down for patching and maintenance on Thursday (May 21) at 3:00 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time. This is expected to be a brief outage, lasting 10 minutes or so. Thanks in advance for your patience!
Published on 14 May 2026
As any of you who have perused the London Stage Database know, sometimes you come across performance events that leave you asking: “what in the WORLD was going on here?” Yes, performance events from the long eighteenth-century can be so bizarre as to seem (at first glance) indecipherable.
For this week’s #theaterthursday, I bring you one such event: May 14th, 1711 at Punch’s Theatre.
“[A] Benefit [for] the Little Child that Dances with the Swords. (…) With new Scenes, Machines, and several Dances by Fairies.”
Dancing Fairies? Machines? A child performing with swords?! Surreal as it is, this event was far too interesting to ignore.
The first clue we have in parsing out the performance of May 14th is the venue: Punch’s Theatre.
During the 1710-1711 season, a man by the name of Martin Powell ran this playhouse, located close to Covent Garden. Punch’s was, in fact a puppet theater, and Powell quite the famous... Read More
Published on 12 May 2026
Late last Thursday, a federal judge ordered the NEH to restore thousands of grants that were terminated en masse last spring, including one to our project, “Extending the London Stage Database.” After more than a year of uncertainty, we have a victory…at least, in court. Read on for more details about what this decision actually means for LSDB and the thousands of other projects affected.
What does this decision say?
1) The terminations were unconstitutional.
In her 143-page decision, Judge McMahon ruled against the operatives of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) who cancelled nearly every active NEH grant in April 2025. She found that they had violated grantees’ rights under the U.S. Constitution–specifically, the first and fifth amendment provisions protecting freedom of speech, freedom of association, and equal access to due process under the law:
“The injury is not limited to the loss of money; it includes the disruption of protected expression,... Read More
Published on 07 May 2026
Attention fans of the London Stage! Get your tickets now and line up early because Drury Lane is the place to be tonight! We simply can’t guarantee everyone a spot in the audience! Don’t believe me?
Well believe the one unlucky theatergoer of May 7th, 1776 who (perhaps not arriving early enough) “[a]ttempted to get into Drury Lane Theatre (…) but the crowd was so great that after suffering thumps, squeezes and almost suffocation for two hours, [ ] was oblig’d to retire.”
That’s right, Londoners were SO frantic to attend the performance of The Stratagem that the playbill made sure to outline that “Ladies and Gentlemen [were] most earnestly requested to come early.”
Want to know what all the excitement was about? It just so happens that Drury Lane wasn’t just putting on Stratagem that night, it was staging the grand finales of not one, but TWO stage greats.
A Starlet and a Stage Manager
Frances... Read More
Published on 30 April 2026
Happy April 30th readers! Don’t you just love spring? April showers, May flowers, and, of course, wedding season! Speaking of which, it just so happens that on this #theaterthursday, London was deep in the throes of celebration over none other than a ROYAL wedding!
On April 30th, 1736, Goodman’s Fields Theatre put on a performance of The Conscious Lovers “in Honour of the Royal Marriage.” It was such a momentous occasion that some of the audience had even been treated to tickets at the expense of Goodman Fields manager, Henry Giffard, himself!
As if complimentary tickets were insufficient, “a large Quantity of Liquor” was also provided for attendants and the stage was decorated with “several Glass Lustres. Even the exterior of Goodman’s Fields was alight that night with decorative candles: announcing to the entire city the extents undertaken to celebrate the royal match.
The Royal Couple
Augusta of Saxe-Gotha, Princess of Wales by Charles... Read More