Donmar Warehouse

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The Donmar Warehouse is a small theatre in the Covent Garden area of the West End of London.

1 History
2 Current status
3 See also
4 External link

[edit] History

Theatrical producer Donald Albery formed the Donmar company in 1953, the name reputedly formed from DONald Albery and MARgot Fonteyn, the ballerina and a close personal friend.

In 1961, Albery bought the site, a space that was once the vat room and hop warehouse of a brewery, as a private drama studio and rehearsal room for Fonteyn's London Festival Ballet. It was acquired as a theatre by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1977. The theatre became an independent producing house in 1992 with Sam Mendes as artistic director.

Mendes quickly transformed the theatre into one of the most exciting venues in the city. His opening production was Stephen Sondheim's Assassins which revelled in the show's dark, comic brilliance and rescued it from the critical opprobrium it had suffered on its American opening. He followed this with a series of excellent classic revivals, many of which attracted some of the finest actors and biggest stars of the decade. Among Mendes's best productions were John Kander and Fred Ebb's Cabaret, Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie, Stephen Sondheim's Company, Alan Bennett's Habeas Corpus and his farewell duo of Chekhov's Uncle Vanya and Twelfth Night, which transferred to the Brooklyn Academy of Music. As artistic director Mendes also gave some of the country's finest younger directors the opportunity to do some of their best work: Matthew Warchus's production of Sam Shepard's True West, Katie Mitchell's of Beckett's Endgame, David Leveaux's of Sophocles's Elektra and Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing were amongst the most critically acclaimed of the decade. And the Donmar's present artistic director Michael Grandage directed some of the key productions of the later part of Mendes's tenure, including Peter Nichols's Passion Play and Privates on Parade and Sondheim's Merrily We Roll Along.

[edit] Current status

The current artistic director is Michael Grandage.

The Donmar Warehouse currently produces a mixed programme of new plays, revivals and musicals. Its revivals of foreign plays regularly commission new translations (or 'versions'), i.e. Ibsen's The Wild Duck (David Eldridge), Racine's Phadera (Frank McGuinness) and Fo's Accidental Death of An Anarchist (Simon Nye) within the past few years. Its recent musical productions have included Grand Hotel and the Stephen Sondheim works, Pacific Overtures, Merrily We Roll Along, Company, Into the Woods and the 1992 production of Assassins that opened Sam Mendes' tenure as Artistic Director.

Numerous well known British and non-British actors have appeared at the theatre, including Nicole Kidman (The Blue Room), Gwyneth Paltrow (Proof) and Ian McKellen (The Cut).