American Savoyards

American Savoyards was an Off-Broadway and touring repertory theatre company that produced light operas, principally the works of Gilbert and Sullivan, in New York City and on tour between 1948 and 1967.

In 1948, director Dorothy Raedler started a professional Gilbert and Sullivan repertory company, The Masque and Lyre Light Opera Company, named after an amateur theatre group that she had founded in 1939 in college and directed under that name. They opened on Long Island with four different G&S shows, moving to New York City in 1949. The company stayed in New York City for three and half years, performing ten of the Savoy Operas plus Cox and Box.

Raedler planned to take the company on tour in 1952. She traveled to England in June 1952 with her leading comic baritone and leading soprano, Rue and Sally Knapp, to research W.S. Gilbert's staging, choreography, costumes, properties and other aspects of the original Gilbert and Sullivan productions. She intended her productions to follow the performance "traditions" of the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company, and she replicated "authentic" costumes as closely as possible. Raedler's intentions, as stated in the company's program notes, were to avoid "pork pie" gags or cheap laughs, to stay true to Gilbert's stylistic intentions and to give each member of her company intensive training in the art. Raedler also decided that her company would use American stage diction, rather than British, and attractive actors, to cater to her audiences. Like Gilbert, Raedler was known as a hard taskmaster in rehearsals and an exacting director.

For this first tour, Raedler renamed the company American Savoyards. The first shows on tour were The Mikado and Patience. Early tours included U.S. states from Florida to Maine. Subsequent tours included places as far away as California and Canada. Each winter, the company returned to New York City, often performing at the Jan Hus Playhouse on East 74th Street, the downstairs room in a church. The group claimed to be the only professional theatre company performing the full G&S repertoire, as the D'Oyly Carte had retired several productions.

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