Castlereagh Street, Sydney
A vertical ROYAL sign, lit crowns above the entrance, an illuminated awning, and a marquee big enough to read from across the road: for most of a century the Theatre Royal put more light onto Castlereagh Street than the street ever made for itself, and it was Sydney's principal playhouse throughout.
It was born out of a fire. When the second Prince of Wales Theatre burned in January 1872, its architect J. F. Hilly was commissioned to build a replacement and kept the Castlereagh Street frontage of the old house; the Theatre Royal opened in 1875 and ran drama, vaudeville and film until 1972. The marquee here bills *Annie Get Your Gun* with Evie Hayes — a J. C. Williamson production that had already played ten months in Melbourne before opening at the Royal on 27 August 1948 and running a further twelve. Hayes went on playing Annie Oakley for six years and more than three thousand performances.
The theatre did not survive its block. In 1971–72 the Royal and most of the buildings around it came down for the MLC Centre, and it was only public agitation and the building unions, after the doors had already closed, that pushed Lend Lease into designing a replacement theatre into the tower.
Sixty years earlier the same street was still shedding its first skin. A timber-fronted shop stands behind a paling fence with a conical sheet-metal roof and a window of vases and pottery, its sign reading *Pottie / Veterinary Surgeon* — a low, wooden Sydney standing among buildings already condemned, on a street that would end up lit by neon.
