Talent, investments, and hot dogs keep the 50-year-old Melodrama healthy as a horse

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Editor’s note: This is the first in a two-part series going behind the scenes with the Great American Melodrama’s owners, cast, and crew.

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 onstage,” 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 scream yeehaw for the upcoming show’s performers to don. 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.

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 uncluttered 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 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 for 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.” Δ

Senior Staff Writer Caleb Wiseblood, from New Times’ sister paper, the Sun, is booing at all the villains. Send comments to cwiseblood@santamariasun.com.

This article appears in Pride 2025.