Washington Savoyards highlights ... Patience, Kiss Me, Kate, The Merry Widow, Babes in Toyland, Pirates of Penzance, Man of La Mancha, The Music Man

the company

The Washington Savoyards is the light opera company of Washington. It performs comic and light opera, operetta, and musical theatre. Remembering its roots as a Gilbert and Sullivan company, it mounts at least one of their popular light operas each season.

Focusing on opera and theatre professionals resident in the metropolitan area, the Company provides employment, training, performance experience, and artistic support to its performers and crew members. It is committed to non-traditional casting.

The Washington Savoyards embodies laughter and the human spirit, superb local artists, and community development. The Savoyards serve children and families by providing free and discounted tickets. We support discounted tickets for senior citizens, military, and students. We partner with charities, colleges and universities, and the churches that give us audition and rehearsal space at greatly reduced prices. We hire solely according to ability without regard for ethnicity or age. Our goal is to have our casts and our audiences look like the neighborhood in which we perform and the metropolitan area in which we live. Our casts have included Equity actors. We have a sense of humor and give our audiences musical and physical dexterity. Our pit has a full live orchestra. A Washington Savoyards production utilizes every aspect of the performing arts. We draw on the magnificent pool of Washington’s talented performing artists for whom we provide a stage for their talents and additions to their resumes. We live and perform at the Atlas Performing Arts Center, in the heart of the emerging H Street Corridor (the New York Times calls it “H [as in humming] Street.” Our casts, crews, and audiences directly support the economic development of the Atlas District and its restaurants and businesses, bringing as many as10,000 people into the Atlas District each season. Washington ’s rich culture by producing a repertory dedicated to light opera, operetta, and musical theatre. We are the only resident professional producer of Gilbert and Sullivan’s light operas, a repertory of the British tradition second only in performance to that of Shakespeare.

The Washington Savoyards was formed in 1972 as the Montgomery Savoyards by the founding director, Audrey Shipp. From 1972-1980 productions were staged in the Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring, Maryland. The Montgomery Savoyards became the Washington Savoyards in 1979. This change in name marked not only the Company’s physical move to the Trinity Theatre in Georgetown but also its transition from a suburban based group to an organization reaching out to the entire metropolitan area. The Savoyards moved a few blocks north to the Duke Ellington Theatre in 1988 and in 2006 began performing in the not yet completed Atlas Performing Arts Center north of Capitol Hill. Its first main stage productions in the Atlas began in 2007 with its first musical, Cole Porter’s Kiss Me, Kate. The Company has performed the entire Gilbert and Sullivan corpus, including their lesser known operettas, Utopia Ltd. and The Grand Duke as well as Sullivan’s Cox and Box.

The Company is grateful for the funding and encouragement of the Morris & Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation, the Fund for Maryland's Future, the Eugene M. Lang Foundation, the MARPAT Foundation, the Eugene and Agnes E. Meyer Foundation, the Nora Roberts Foundation, the Sprenger-Lang Foundation, The Stafford Foundation, and many corporate and individual donors. An important point in its growth as an organization came in 2004 when it was accepted into residency at Flashpoint, Washington, D.C.'s arts incubator.

The Washington Savoyards closed its 2007-2008 season with reprise performances of The Pirates of Penzance at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center at the University of Maryland, College Park. During the 2008-2009 season it mounted highly acclaimed productions of The Music Man and Iolanthe. Sandy Bainum received a Helen Hayes Award Nomination for her role as Marian Paroo in The Music Man.