The archive
Every production since 1930
The company gave its first performance, Pearl the Fishermaid, at the Wesleyan Schools in Willenhall on 18 March 1930. Every show it has staged since is on this page, along with the two runs of years when it could not perform at all.
- Productions
- 91
- The whole record
- 1930 to 2027
- Musicals
- 87
- NODA West Midlands wins
- 3
The full list
Everything the company has staged, 1930 to 2027.
2020s
6 productions
6 of 6 with a record
2020 to 2021
The coronavirus pandemic
The company had announced Oklahoma! for the following April in its 2019 Sister Act programme. The poster and flyers were designed and the programme itself was last saved on 21 February 2020. The final change anyone made to any of the artwork was on 10 March 2020, days before theatres across the country closed. Oklahoma! was never staged, and nor was the Shrek that followed it: tickets for that went on sale in August 2020, and the company's own audition paperwork a year later calls it the cancelled 2021 show. The company came back in 2022 with Priscilla Queen of the Desert, and finally staged Shrek in 2023.
2010s
13 productions
13 of 13 with a record
2000s
10 productions
10 of 10 with a record
1990s
10 productions
6 of 10 with a record
1950s
10 productions
2 of 10 with a record
1940s
3 productions
Titles and years only
1939 to 1946
The Second World War
The Arcadians in 1938 was the last production before the war. The company did not stage another until Viktoria and her Hussar in 1947, by which time it had moved from the Wesleyan Schools to Willenhall Baths.
What this list is, and what it is not
The titles and the years are the solid part of the record, kept by the company itself and by the people who wrote its history. The detail thins the further back you go. Of the 91 productions listed here, 33 have a synopsis, 39 have a cast list and 7 have a review that somebody kept.
It is staged shows only. The company also puts on a fundraising concert most years, in a club room rather than a theatre, and those are not listed here: 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2018. They have no cast list or production team to record, and a concert night is a different thing from a show the company spent six months rehearsing.
Nothing on these pages has been filled in with a good guess. Where a production page says the cast is not recorded, it means exactly that, and it usually means the programme is sitting in somebody’s loft rather than in the company’s files.
39 of these productions, all between 1931 and 1993, have no cast list, no production team and no running order. Everything from 2000 onwards does. The company staged those earlier shows for real, in front of full houses, and what is missing is not the fact of them but everybody who was in them.
If you were in one, or your mother was, or you have a programme in a drawer, a photograph or a cutting from the local paper, that is the missing half of this archive. A programme can be scanned and posted back.
Help us fill the gaps