D'Oyly Carte Opera Company

In 1875, Richard D'Oyly Carte asked the dramatist W. S. Gilbert and the composer Arthur Sullivan to collaborate on a short comic opera to round out an evening's entertainment.

Needing a short piece to round out an evening's entertainment featuring the popular Offenbach operetta La Périchole he brought W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan together.

[24][25] The skill with which Gilbert and Sullivan used their performers had an effect on the audience; as the critic Herman Klein wrote: "we secretly marvelled at the naturalness and ease with which [the Gilbertian quips and absurdities] were said and done.

[1] On 31 July 1879, the last day of their agreement with Gilbert and Sullivan, the directors of the Comedy Opera Company attempted to repossess the set by force during a performance, causing a celebrated fracas.

[48][49] To try to make some money from the popularity of their opera in America, Carte travelled to New York with Gilbert, Sullivan and the company to present an "authentic" production of Pinafore on Broadway, beginning in December 1879, also mounting American tours.

[55] To secure the British copyright, there was a perfunctory performance the afternoon before the New York premiere, at the Royal Bijou Theatre, Paignton, Devon, organised by Helen Lenoir.

As Jessie Bond described in her autobiography: No lingering about was allowed, no gossiping with the other actors; the women’s dressing-rooms were on one side of the stage, the men's on the other, and when we were not actually playing we had to mount at once our respective narrow staircases – sheep rigorously separated from the goats!

Once, when my mother came to see me in London, expecting to find me dwelling in haunts of gilded luxury, and far down the road to perdition, I took her behind the scenes and showed her the arrangements for the actors and actresses, conventual in their austerity.

[60]With profits from the success of the Gilbert and Sullivan operas and his concert and lecture agency (his talent roster included Adelina Patti, Clara Schumann, Offenbach, Oscar Wilde and Charles Gounod),[14] Carte bought property along the Strand with frontage onto the Thames Embankment, where he built the Savoy Theatre in 1881.

[67] In the 1880s Carte also introduced the practice of licensing amateur theatrical societies to present works for which he held the rights, increasing their popularity and the sales of scores and libretti, as well as the rental of band parts.

[16] Bernard Shaw, writing in The World in October 1893, commented, "Those who are old enough to compare the Savoy performances with those of the dark ages, taking into account the pictorial treatment of the fabrics and colours on the stage, the cultivation and intelligence of the choristers, the quality of the orchestra, and the degree of artistic good breeding, so to speak, expected from the principals, best know how great an advance has been made by Mr. D'Oyly Carte.

[97] The D'Oyly Carte company turned to new writing teams for the Savoy, first producing The Nautch Girl, by George Dance, Desprez and Edward Solomon, which ran for a satisfying 200 performances in 1891–92.

[18] The Savoy's shows during this period received comparatively short runs, including His Majesty (1897), The Grand Duchess of Gerolstein (1897), The Beauty Stone (1898) and The Lucky Star (1899), as well as revivals of the Gilbert and Sullivan operas.

[110] She leased the Savoy Theatre to William Greet in 1901 and oversaw his management of the company's revival of Iolanthe and the production of several new comic operas, including The Emerald Isle (1901), Merrie England (1902) and A Princess of Kensington (with music by German, libretto by Hood), which ran for four months in early 1903 and then toured.

[125] Rupert D'Oyly Carte found the company's productions increasingly "dowdy", however, and on his return from the war, he determined to refresh them, bringing in new designers including W. Bridges-Adams for the sets, and, for the costumes, George Sheringham and Hugo Rumbold.

In an interview in The Observer in August 1919, Carte set out his policy for staging the operas: "They will be played precisely in their original form, without any alteration to the words, or any attempt to bring them up to date.

"[64] The main company made a triumphant return to London for the 1919–20 season at the Prince's Theatre, playing most of the Gilbert and Sullivan operas in repertory and showing off the new sets and costumes.

[126] For London seasons, Carte engaged guest conductors, first Geoffrey Toye, then Malcolm Sargent, who examined Sullivan's manuscript scores and purged the orchestral parts of accretions.

Royston Nash, who was at the company's musical helm from 1971 to 1979, conducted most of the performances, with Isidore Godfrey (Pinafore) and Sir Charles Mackerras (Pirates and Mikado) as guest conductors.

In the final performance of Trial by Jury, the regular D'Oyly Carte chorus was augmented by fourteen former stars of the company: Sylvia Cecil, Elsie Griffin, Ivan Menzies, John Dean, Radley Flynn, Elizabeth Nickell-Lean, Ella Halman, Leonard Osborn, Cynthia Morey, Jeffrey Skitch, Alan Barrett, Mary Sansom, Philip Potter and Gillian Humphreys.

"[164] Throughout its history, the company maintained strict moral standards, and it was sometimes referred to as the "Savoy boarding school", enforcing policies regarding behaviour on and off stage, and even a dress code.

[156] After the 1979 tour, the rising costs of mounting year-round professional light opera without any government support, despite some generous private contributions, caused the company to accrue increasing losses.

[182] Some critics, however, thought that it was time to sweep away "bad and lazy" traditions of the old company, calling the production "riotous, zany and subversive ... with a Goonish or Pythonesque sense of slapstick comedy", noting that "The girls are pretty and the boys are handsome, and they sing and dance with a youthful freshness".

[181] Also in 1991, the company accepted an offer from the Alexandra Theatre, Birmingham, to make its base there, although its pattern of spring national tours and summer London seasons was not affected.

[204] In 2021 and 2022, the company co-produced The Gondoliers and a staged but concert-dress version of Utopia, Limited with Scottish Opera and State Opera South Australia, directed by Stuart Maunder and conducted by Derek Clark, starring Suart, Yvonne Howard, William Morgan, Mark Nathan, Charlie Drummond, Ben McAteer, Sioned Gwen Davies, Arthur Bruce, Catriona Hewitson and Dan Shelvey.

[206] Other performers who created a long series of roles in the original productions of the operas included the baritone Rutland Barrington, mezzo-soprano Jessie Bond, soprano Leonora Braham, contralto Rosina Brandram, tenor Durward Lely and bass-baritone Richard Temple.

Other performers from this period include the mezzo-soprano Nellie Briercliffe, bass-baritone Darrell Fancourt, who is estimated to have portrayed the Mikado of Japan more than 3,000 times, contralto Bertha Lewis, tenor Derek Oldham, soprano Elsie Griffin and baritones Leo Sheffield and Sydney Granville.

[216] During Pratt's years, principals included the bass-baritone Donald Adams, tenor Leonard Osborn (who later directed the company's productions), contralto Ann Drummond-Grant and mezzo-soprano Joyce Wright.

[156] Other stars from this era were Thomas Round, Donald Adams, Gillian Knight, Valerie Masterson and Kenneth Sandford, all of whom, except the last, left the company for the wider operatic stage of Covent Garden, Sadler's Wells, English National Opera, Aix-en-Provence and elsewhere.

[223] A one-act parody, called A "G. & S." Cocktail; or, A Mixed Savoy Grill, written by Lauri Wylie, with music by Herman Finck, premiered on 9 March 1925 at the London Hippodrome as part of the revue Better Days.