Savage : The Story

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Savage: The Unconquerable Wanda Savage tells the true story of Wanda Savage, a Chickasaw sharpshooter who shoots her way out of Oklahoma and onto the vaudeville stage, dazzling audiences with a rifle and a showgirl's swagger. She would marry five husbands and shoot only two of them. Her talent makes her a star, but it never makes her free. Born to a Chickasaw mother and a white father, Wanda is caught between two worlds in a society that refuses to fully accept her as either Native or white. As a Native woman in early twentieth-century America, she is something every man around her believes he can own, sell, or remake. Husbands, managers, and showmen try to remake her in the image that suits them, scripting her life as if it were one of her acts. To survive, she's forced to make her own body and image the price of admission…the only currency a world like this will let her spend.

The cost of her rise is staggering. Her son is taken from her to an Indian boarding school, stripping him of his language, customs, and family. Wanda keeps performing, dazzling a country that is, at the very same time, working to erase her people. Where vaudeville exploited her heritage, Hollywood erased it, whitewashing her on screen and turning a Chickasaw woman into a marketable fantasy. The real Wanda is pushed to the margins of her own story.

Across a life of reinvention, exploitation, and refusal, Wanda fights to reclaim her son, her body, her identity, and her place in a world that wants her gone on every count…for being Native, and for being a woman who won't disappear. Set against the Roaring Twenties and the rise of the New Woman, an era of flappers, footlights, and reinvention, Savage tells the story of a Chickasaw woman claiming that same freedom while fighting the erasure, violence, and loss the age's glamour left out of the picture.

The forces that tried to erase Wanda Savage, from the boarding schools to Hollywood, are the same ones that have kept Native voices off the American stage for a century. At its heart, Savage is a woman's story: the fight to be seen as herself, to belong without being remade, to survive a world that keeps deciding who she's allowed to be. These are struggles women still know today. That it is also, inseparably, a Chickasaw woman's story is what makes it hers alone, inspired by the life of the writer's own great-grandmother and told at last by her own descendant, claiming the spotlight history denied her.

The real Wanda Savage was a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation, as is her great-granddaughter, co-writer, composer, and lyricist, Nicolette Blount. Savage presents a modern view of Native Americans against a historical backdrop, centering a culture and a people who remain underrepresented on the American stage. The writers weave the Chickasaw language into moments of the script and score, honoring its significance to the Chickasaw people and bringing awareness to a language with fewer than 40 fluent first-language speakers left, all elders over the age of 60.

Featuring a pop-infused jazz and blues score with Native-inspired elements, the music of Savage is a fresh take on the form: it marries the old sounds of jazz and the standards with new, catchy pop, giving the show a contemporary feel while honoring the era it lives in.

What industry insiders are saying after seeing Savage - 

“I have watched and read more new shows than I can count. Very few have legs, but this is going to be a hit!” 

-Michelle Elkin, Broadway, film and T.V. choreographer and actress

 "Savage has a haunting, yet buoyant jazzy score of loss and redemption. Like the trail of tears, it’s truth still echoes today. The smart and savvy lyrics transcends time. Broadway bound!” 

-Jo-Ann Dean, Broadway Producer and owner of Broadway Signs

On Savage - 

“Wanda Savage fascinates people! A strong willed woman who unapologetically broke the norms of traditional gender stereotypes. There is undeniably mass appeal for this story. This is the time for Wanda’s story to be on stage!” 

- Rachel Klein, director and choreographer 

Savage defies comparison, as one Broadway producer put it...

As a Broadway Producer recently said, “Savage is nothing like anything I have seen to date. It is uniquely and powerfully it‘s own.” 

Savage - The Unconquerable Wanda Savage

Book: Nicolette Blount and Lindel Hart

Music and lyrics: Nicolette Blount 

"As a Chickasaw writer, I want to acknowledge that Savage: The Unconquerable Wanda Savage was written on the ancestral homelands of the Pocumtuk people." - Nicolette Blount