Stage direction: Great American Melodrama artists and operators reflect on the quirky theater’s 50th anniversary

Our weekly Events Wire newsletter is your guide to Northern Santa Barbara County concerts, arts, and local happenings—delivered every Friday.

SEND ME EVENT HIGHLIGHTS!

Flanked by unmarked gravestones, vampire coffins, and headless mannequins, scenic carpenter Martin Ramirez stands inside a two-story building on the north end of the Great American Melodrama’s parking lot. 

He’s one of the employees who breathes fresh life into the theater’s archive department on a regular basis. His workspace across from the theater preserves oodles of props, costumes, and custom-built set components. Some are as old and kooky as the Oceano staple itself. 

On the eve of the theater’s 50th anniversary, Ramirez took on the recent task of completing some new set backgrounds in preparation for How the West Was Really Won. The show opens on June 20.

 “It’s really surreal seeing this stuff come to life on stage,” Ramirez said as he sanded a wooden silhouette of a cactus before moving on to some saloon-style shutters.

Just around the corner from Ramirez’s woodworking area, there’s cowboy hats, boots, and other period-appropriate attire that screams yeehaw for the upcoming show’s performers to adorn. Upstairs, there’s a stash of prop pistols and rifles to pull from, Melodrama artistic director Johnny Keating said.

 “Basically, you need horses and guns,” Keating said, adding that they are some of the mainstays that the Melodrama’s fanbase looks forward to year after year. Each season usually includes at least one Western, with heroic gunslingers to cheer for and conniving villains to boo and hiss at.

When Keating first worked for the Melodrama as an actor in 2008, he saw a motto written in marker somewhere backstage that sums up the theater’s endgame each night: “A hot dog in every hand and a laugh per minute.”

Since its first run during the summer of 1975, the Melodrama has been a haven for anyone craving a night of family-friendly cabaret with a hot dog or two— and maybe some nachos and popcorn—paired with a cold beer or soda. 

Co-founder Anet Carlin said that the snack bar was there from the beginning.

 “We had this real old refrigerator from the ’30s, and you could get four barrels of beer in there,” Carlin recalled. “I bought a popcorn machine, and one by one we added more food. And everything would sell.”

Carlin and fellow co-founder John Schlenker’s decision to serve food and drinks right out of the gate wasn’t about making extra cash. That revenue literally keeps the theater afloat, Carlin explained.

 “The concessions pay payroll. Not the admission,” Carlin said. “The admission is covering the cost of operating—creating the scenery and paying all the auxiliary people that have to deal with that. And then the bar covers payroll.”

Reflecting on the Melodrama’s 50th year in business, Carlin said that a lot of things had to go right to reach this milestone, and it shouldn’t be taken for granted.

“It is unbelievable how hard it is to open a theater,” said Carlin, who also co-founded Templeton’s Blazing Horse Feathers, a short-lived venture she essentially described as a Melodrama clone.

The Templeton venue opened in 1991 but closed within two years after the space Carlin and her partners rented came under new ownership.

“Somebody bought the building, and we didn’t have the right kind of lease,” Carlin said. “So they just threw us out.”

When Carlin and Schlenker came across the Oceano property they wanted for the Melodrama, they entered a lease as renters in the early ’70s. But the duo was eventually able to split the cost of buying the land, Carlin said.

In 1988, Schlenker and his wife, Lynne, became the sole owners of the Melodrama when Carlin sold her share. Like Carlin, Lynne isn’t sure what the Melodrama’s future would have been if its founders had decided to continue paying rent on the site for all this time.

 “I think it was a wise investment,” Lynne said. 

The Melodrama’s stewards have faced similar crossroads over the years where they decided to embrace investments rather than stick with the status quo. Luckily, time has shown those risks weren’t in vain, said Lynne, whose quirky and thriving theater once reimagined Mamma Mia! as a love story between a Pismo clam and a seagull.

Chewing the scenery

Perched on a towering platform, a large-scale dragon keeps a watchful eye over the Melodrama’s treasure trove of costumes and stage props inside the venue’s neighboring building.

Prop figures and busts of horses and other animals keep the lone dragon company, but Melodrama managing director Stacy Halvorsen suggested that there may have been multiple dragons guarding the two-story facility at some point.

 “I need to stop bringing stray dragons home,” Halvorsen said with a laugh.

In the grand scheme of the Melodrama’s history, this storage building is a fairly new development.

After decades of renting space about a mile from the theater for storage, Lynne and her husband decided it would pay off in the long run to develop a 12,000-square-foot structure on the property they already owned.

 “It cost $1.5 million [to build], but it’s worth way more than that now,” Lynne said. 

Prior to the facility’s completion in 2018, the Melodrama’s owners paid monthly rent for three storage units on Pike Street in Oceano. Those fees weren’t the only periodic costs attached to this arrangement, Halvorsen explained.

 “In between shows, they had to rent U-Hauls and haul everything over, back and forth,” Halvorsen said. “The props and the costumes and the scenics.” 

Having a separate building dedicated to the Melodrama’s behind-the-scenes action came with non-monetary benefits as well, especially for the company’s performers and dance choreographers, artistic director Keating said.

On the building’s second level, there’s a large patch of floorspace—seemingly vacant from a distance, minus one piano—that stands out from the rest of the facility, which is crowded with countless antique store-style aisles of props and clothes.

A closer look at the clutterless area reveals different colored tape marking various outlines along the floor. This specific space is reserved for show rehearsals, and the tape mimics certain barriers that correspond to the Melodrama’s main stage.

In the past, Melodrama actors relied solely on the main stage for practiced run-throughs, Halvorsen said.

 “[Actors] used to rehearse on the stage during the day, and then the show was there at night, so the stage manager was having to move everything on and off the stage,” she explained.

 “We never saw daylight,” Keating added.

Plus, there are big wide windows in the current space for natural sunlight, something the Melodrama’s main stage can’t offer, Keating said.

The neighboring building’s rehearsal area also has ample space to move large rolling mirrors whenever needed, which especially helps with dance numbers. The reflections make it easier for a show’s choreographer to keep track of everyone in the ensemble, and the dancers to keep track of themselves too.

 “The rolling mirrors are killer for choreography,” Keating said. “They just make the choreography so much cleaner.”

Talent scouting

Like many artists the Melodrama attracts, Keating is a California transplant. His career’s colored with performing arts gigs in Arizona, Florida, Washington, and other states.

After relocating from Minnesota to Oceano in 2008 to act in his first Melodrama show, he became fast friends with his peers at the company offstage, partly thanks to their living situation.

The Melodrama’s inclusive housing, offered as part of the company’s contracts with actors and creative team members since the theater’s inception, allows artists traveling from afar to jump right into a production’s rehearsal period without worrying about finding a place to stay. 

From the Melodrama’s beginning, the company’s lodging options have always been within walking distance of the theater, since a lot of out-of-area talent would fly or bus in “without cars,” Melodrama co-owner Lynne said.

Lynne and her husband currently own two properties—a five-bedroom house and a three-bedroom condo—they’ve designated to house Melodrama employees.

During the theater’s early years, however, the couple rented a handful of different spots in Oceano where they offered housing to employees. Staying on brand with an optimistic and cost-effective outlook, the pair bought the three-bedroom condo about 30 years ago. Less than a decade later, they purchased the five-bedroom house.

Between the two properties, Melodrama managing director Halvorsen said that local talent also regularly use the company’s housing.

Some Melodrama regulars have taken advantage of the option periodically over several years, and they’ve experienced different iterations of either household—comparing it to different seasons of a reality show. Billy Breed is one such actor.

Born and raised in West Virginia, Breed lent his acting and dancing skills to theaters in New York, Tennessee, and other states before first stepping onto the Great American Melodrama’s stage in the late ’90s. 

After a few shows with the company, he ventured to Illinois. But he couldn’t get the Central Coast out of his head and returned about five years later to work with the Melodrama again.

 “They’re like a theatrical family, and a very unique theater in what they do,” said Breed, a recognizable face for anyone who’s been to a Melodrama, PCPA, or SLO REP show in the past two decades.

Later this summer, Breed will join other notable figures in the Melodrama’s pantheon to begin rehearsals for the theater’s 50th anniversary celebration, described as a song, dance, and comedy showcase with selected highlights from past years’ productions. Performances open on Aug. 8 and will run through Sept. 20.

The people Breed’s collaborated with and befriended via the local theater community are a big part of what’s kept him here for so long, he said. But what really drew him back to the area after living in Chicago wasn’t related to theater at all, Breed admitted.

 “Chicago is a great working actors’ town. But I thought, ‘I cannot stand these winters,’” Breed said with a laugh.

Channeling that chilly attitude comes in handy whenever Breed gets to play Ebenezer Scrooge, the role he’s most frequently reprised during his time with the Melodrama, as part of the theater’s annual winter production, The Holiday Extravaganza.

If Breed ever gets a real-life visit from the Ghost of Christmas Past, it might take him back to Christmas Eve 2008. He was staying in the same cast house as Keating at the time.

 “We had a lovely dinner, and all of us brought our mattresses into the living room like a sleepover and had a fire in the fireplace,” Keating recalled. “We all had waffles in the morning. That’s a really clean, sweet version of all the wild times we had there.”

Keating said that the Melodrama’s newest actors, many in their 20s or 30s, seem “much more subdued” than past generations who’ve used the housing. Melodrama managing director Halvorsen agreed.

 “They’re not drinkers or real big partiers,” Halvorsen said. “The only problems that come up are like, ‘Oh, we need another controller to play Mario Kart.’”

One day before rehearsals started for the theater’s current production, a spoof of Les Misérables aptly named Less Miserable (onstage now through June 14), first-time Melodrama actor Madeline Gambon unpacked her belongings in the cast house she’s staying at.

 “It’s been really lovely so far. We’re all cool with each other,” said Gambon, originally from Ventura County. “It’s very nice because I like being able to come home and know that I’ll be able to hibernate in my space of need or that we can all hang out. We’ll chill in our rooms but we’re willing to chill with each other.”

Gambon’s first impression of the Melodrama once her work on Less Miserable began was: “This place is a well-oiled machine.” 

Keating hired Gambon for the Melodrama after meeting her through the Unified Professional Theatre Auditions program, which was also Breed’s gateway into the Melodrama back in 1998.

Another thing Gambon and Breed have in common is they’re not immune to snack bar cravings after most shows. 

 “I’ll just snack on whatever’s available at the end of the night,” Gambon said. “There tends to be a couple baked potatoes, and nacho cheese, and the chips.”

Senior Staff Writer Caleb Wiseblood is grabbing extra jalapeños. Send comments to cwiseblood@santamariasun.com.

This article appears in May 29 – Jun 8, 2025.