Capital Playhouse is an twenty year old, private non-profit, performing arts education and performance organization located in Olympia, Washington. The Playhouse operates year round.  Seven of the eight separate and distinct programs serve youth between the ages of five and eighteen.  Located in the downtown business community, the Playhouse has a 125-seat black box theater on site with plans to expand.  To date several thousand area youth have sung, danced and acted in nearly one hundred KIDS AT PLAY productions to the enjoyment of more than 240,000 audience members.  The programs include Season in a Box, the Playhouse’s chamber musical season for older youth and adults which occurs between October and May in the black box theater; school year Saturday theatre arts classes; the Page to Stage Theatre-Literacy Program and Kids in Koncert, the 60-voice youth concert and performance choir.

The largest program, KIDS AT PLAY, has been in place since 1986, Capital Playhouse’s founding year.  KIDS AT PLAY is a comprehensive musical theatre and performance program using a summer stock model, and has an enrollment of 350 students between the ages of 8 and 18.  Each summer for ten weeks, six full-scale musical theatre productions are rehearsed with casts of between fifty and sixty students each.  At the end of each of the five week rehearsal periods, five public performances are held at South Puget Sound Community College.   Mid-summer, four productions are simultaneously in some phase of rehearsal at the playhouse and audience attendance is near capacity for each of the summer performances.