Göta Lejon

A copper lion over the awning

Göta Lejon sits in the ground floor of the Götgatspalatset block at Götgatan 55, on Södermalm. The building went up between 1926 and 1928 to drawings by the architect Birger Borgström: a block-long rendered facade in a restrained modernism built on neoclassical proportions, its horizontals pulled out by marked floor bands. The entrance canopy is clad in copper and topped by a copper lion modelled by Einar Forseth, who also worked on the decoration of the auditorium. Inside, the stucco was made by Nils Enberg and Carl Elmberg, and the muse figures on the balcony front by Carl-Oscar Avén.

It opened as an SF cinema on 25 January 1928 with 1,307 seats, 541 of them in the balcony. That made it the second-largest cinema in Stockholm at opening, and from 1940 the largest. The lion, the canopy and the façade are still the things that identify the place from the pavement; almost everything behind them has been rebuilt at least twice.

Film, revue, then amplifiers

Films ran at Götgatan 55 into the 1980s, and for much of that time the house was not purely a cinema. The auditorium was adapted so that screenings could alternate with stage work, and the comedy duo Hasse & Tage were among the acts who played it in that period.

From the late 1970s the room worked as a concert hall. Rush played in 1977, AC/DC and Elvis Costello in 1978, the Ramones in 1980, R.E.M. in 1989. The habit never entirely stopped once the theatre work took over: Henry Rollins has returned repeatedly, Sufjan Stevens played in 2015, and Costello came back in 2017, thirty-nine years after his first visit. That dual identity — a proscenium theatre that can take a touring band without rebuilding itself — is the thing that later made it attractive to a promoter rather than a producer.

The musical house, 1994 onwards

The decisive change came in 1994, when GL Teaterproduktion turned the cinema into a musical stage. What followed was the standard Swedish large-cast repertoire, cast with television-familiar names: The Sound of Music with Carola and Tommy Nilsson, Miss Saigon, a Jesus Christ Superstar featuring Ola Salo, and later a Swedish-language High School Musical. For roughly three decades the building's reputation rested on that model — one long-running licensed title at a time, playing to coach parties and Stockholm families.

The operating company changed hands several times without the model changing much. Staffan Götestam's Proscenia took over the running of the theatre in 2000; 3 Sagas AB, which also holds Maximteatern, acquired it in 2008; from 2010 the house was run as Göta Lejon Produktion. Through all of it the auditorium stayed a musical auditorium, with concerts and comedy filling the gaps between runs.

Live Nation and the 2023 rebuild

On 11 January 2023 Live Nation Sweden announced that it had bought Göta Lejon. Mattias Behrer, the company's chief executive, framed the purchase around the central location and the building's history, and said the aim was to make it one of the city's main stages for live popular culture through a mix of concerts, musicals and other events. The stated intention was to pull the balance back towards concerts without dropping the musical work.

Scheduled shows played out until May 2023, after which the theatre closed for rebuilding, with the reopening set for early 2024. The works covered the entrance, the restaurant and the bar areas, and the capacity plan was to go from about 1,100 seated to 1,400 by combining seated and standing configurations. The theatre's own hire material now gives the auditorium as 1,106 seats, 721 of them in the parkett, with no pillars and clear sightlines from every position, and a bar attached to the foyer that can be used on its own.

What is on the stage in 2026

The year opened with farce. Pjäsen som går åt helvete, the Swedish production of The Play That Goes Wrong, premiered on 23 January 2026 and played until 10 May before going out on tour, with a company including Pernilla Wahlgren, Christine Meltzer, Måns Nathanaelson, Kim Sulocki and Andreas T Olsson. It runs ninety minutes without an interval, and the set is built to come apart on cue — a jammed door, collapsing flats, props failing in sequence. The review in BroadwayWorld's Swedish edition the day after the premiere credited the company's timing and noted that the short running time keeps the gags from repeating.

The autumn brought something much heavier. Torka aldrig tårar utan handskar, the first stage version of Jonas Gardell's 2012 trilogy about gay life and the AIDS epidemic in 1980s Stockholm, premiered on 24 September 2026. Gardell wrote the book and lyrics, Fredrik Kempe the score, Carl Johan Karlson directs and Karl-Johan Ankarblom is musical director and arranger. Valdemar Wahlbeck plays Rasmus, Martin Stokke Mathiesen plays Benjamin and Ola Salo plays Paul, with Lucas Krüger as Bengt and Per Öhagen as Lars-Åke. It was close to sold out before it opened and was originally billed to 19 December; the run has since been extended to 6 March 2027.

Around the resident production the house keeps its mixed bill. Djungelboken The Musical is booked in from November into January as the family title, and the venue's own listings carry Ben Folds, the London Symphonic Rock Orchestra, the Georgian National Ballet Sukhishvili and a Whitney Houston tribute show. More than a hundred dates are currently on sale.

What the room asks of a production

The auditorium is large by Stockholm private-theatre standards but shallow enough to stay direct, and the absence of pillars means designers can use the full width without writing off seats. Both of this year's productions have used that literally rather than decoratively: the farce needs the audience to see a set disintegrate in clear view, and the Gardell musical has been praised for scenography that moves between 1980s flats, hospital rooms and small-town Värmland without slowing the storytelling. Reviewers of the autumn show have singled out Mathiesen's opening solo and a Krüger number as the points where the house goes quiet.