The Adelphi Theatre Calendar, Version 3: The completion of the revised Adelphi Theatre Calendar ends a project begun in 1973

Since the Calendar first came online, a variety of questions has been sent to the General Editor – mainly requests for clarifications of dates and queries about appearances of specific performers. In most instances, I as General Editor was able to help. It was clear, however, that many scholars were surprised to discover the Calendar existed, and all those of us involved in its construction hope this announcement will make the presence of the Calendar more widely appreciated, because the project’s primary goal is to be of use to theatre scholars, historians, and their readers.

We note with pleasure the Calendar’s use by Jacky Bratton in writing the entry for Jane Margaret Scott, the originator of the Sans Pareil Theatre (which in time became the Adelphi Theatre), in the Dictionary of National Biography. Perhaps the most notable event at the Adelphi was the murder of William Terriss by Richard Archer. Future biographers will find our daily accounts of Breezy Bill’s performances an invaluable guide. Even the best collections of bills and programmes offer only a hit-or-miss solution, and, as we know to our sorrow, there is no single repository of playbills. Hitherto, a researcher would have to locate programmes, which, if available, could be found scattered among numerous collections, whereas the Calendar, now in its second version, uses those programmes to record every performance of the victim and his murderer (under both of the names he employed).

There have been questions the General Editor whimsically refers to as “negative reinforcement”. It is required when scholars have not found in the daily records what they expected. For example, Keith Robinson, writing The Chinese Visit to England, 1866, came across a reference to a performance of The Favourite of Fortune at the Adelphi. There is no mention of this play in the Calendar. Hitherto such problems were almost impossible to solve because there is usually no record of a specific night’s production. The best hope is the discovery of a playbill or programme. Remarkably, there was a record on the Internet of the play at the Haymarket Theatre, performed on Tuesday, 15 May 1866. (Robinson adds, “This is the only time I can conclusively prove that [Sir Robert] Hart’s Diaries are factually incorrect.”) I was also asked to track down an illustration of a “trial” of the Adelphi, apparently on the charge of ignoring the legitimate drama for pantomime and farce.

Perhaps most surprising was a letter of appreciation from Karen Charlton, who had employed the Calendar when writing her second detective story about the redoubtable Inspector Lavender, entitled The Sans Pareil Mystery.

These and other inquiries encouraged the General Editor and Systems Analyst to produce a revision of the Calendar. The original data would have to remain largely unchanged because the computer language in which they were written no longer exists. Despite this constraint, we made some corrections manually.

The main changes found in the revision are the addition of graphics to the daily calendars, the creation of an All-Inclusive Index, and a reorganization of the “Book” format. Ten of the original sections remain largely unchanged – Daily Calendars, Home Page, Editors’ Page, Authors and Titles, Actors and Actresses, Management, Bibliography, Theatre Research, Adelphi Today, and Book Version. The Graphics Gallery underwent considerable expansion. Musicians and Singers were reorganized into Musicians and Singers and Composers, Music, and Song, and two new indexes – Dance, Entertainment, and Spectacles and the All-Inclusive Index – were added.

The first version of the Calendar was hosted by Eastern Michigan University, and parts were published in binders with daily records available on microfiche. A second version expanded some entries and added illustrations. The sheer length of Version 3 precludes any possibility of publication in any format other than online. The All-Inclusive Index, indexing over 4,700 individuals, runs to over 1,400 pages in Microsoft Word format. It was created as a quick method of locating names. It lists all creative contributors – authors, composers, adaptors, translators, and so on, and all pieces...