Wheeler Theatre Company

The Wheeler Theatre Company was founded in Cape Town in May 1886 by impressario Ben Wheeler (Benjamin Wheeler, "the Gov'nor") and his son Frank Wheeler, two actor managers who focussed on musical comedy or comic opera which included farce, and minstrel programmes (on occasion referred to in playbills as "negro absurdities").

The company and the father-and-son business are both also referred to as Ben and Frank Wheeler, the Wheeler Brothers and The Wheelers on occasion

They came from Australia??**/England??** , to become among the foremost theatrical managers in South Africa in the period before the Anglo-Boer war.

In 1886 Luscombe Searelle was with the company for a year. Among other venues, they used the Good Hope Theatre and the Theatre Royal in Burg Street for their shows. The Hawtrey Comedy Company performed Charley's Aunt under the Wheeler Theatre Company management at the Good Hope Theatre in 18**

In 1895 they brought out W.J. Holloway of the Lyceum, with a theatrical company, to do a series of Shakespeare plays at the Standard Theatre , Johannesburg. The plays included Othello, Twelfth Night, King Lear, Much Ado About Nothing, The Merchant of Venice and School for Scandal.

In 1910-11 their company seemed to be fading, according to the critic and diarist D.C. Boonzaier (1923, cited in Bosman, 1980: p.434). In 1910 they did Dorothy, The Dollar Princess, The Arcadians, and they hosted the Walter Melville Dramatic Company and the De Jong-Black Company at the Opera House. In 1911 they began with Veronique, The Balkan Princess, and finally ended their long run of musical comedies with The Girl in the Train.

Sources

Bosman, 1980,

Bryant, 1979

Fletcher, 1994,

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