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Death Valley’s amazing diva and the Amargosa Opera House

© Brian Salisbury

Death Valley, the hottest place in North America.

From the 1870s into the early 1900s -- with the discovery of gold, silver, copper, lead and other minerals -- this blistering expanse of California and Nevada desert spawned rough and tumble mining towns with names as unlikely as Chloride, Rhyolite, Greenwater, Bad Water, Furnace Creek and Stove Pipe Wells.

One newspaper of the day called Panamint City the "roughest, rawest, most hard-boiled little hellhole that ever passed as a civilized place to live."

And let's not forget the town of Skidoo, the site of Death Valley's only hanging. The locals strung up Hootch Simpson not just once, but twice. The first time for killing a storeowner, and the second time to accommodate news photographers who missed Mr. Simpson's initial swing into the great beyond.

Characters like John (One Eye) Thompson, Shorty Harris, Countess Morajeski and Death Valley Scotty each added a savory pinch of personality to the area's frontier quality.

And even after the mines closed and the boomtowns turned to ghost towns, Death Valley continued to attract hardy, adventurous individuals with an affinity for this rugged inhospitable place. And it still does. Some see opportunities where most do not, and others are just drawn in by the desert's austere beauty.

Such a person is Marta Becket, diva of the Amargosa Opera House. Since 1968, this 80-something-year-old ballerina and actress who once danced and sang on Broadway in New York City, has been singing and dancing in her own productions in her own theater in her own town of Death Valley Junction. Here, her inspiration has turned virtually nothing into something amazing -- an artistic oasis in the desert.

As a young woman, Ms. Becket appeared in Broadway productions including "Showboat," "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn," and "A Wonderful Town." But she craved to dance her own dances, design her own costumes and create her own shows. This is exactly what she did when she took her solo performance on the road.

Married in 1962, Marta and her husband found themselves in California during the spring of 1967. After months of touring and presenting her one-woman theatrical revue to audiences throughout the country, they decided to spend a week camping in Death Valley. One morning, when they saw their trailer had a flat tire, they headed to a garage in Death Valley Junction to get it fixed.

While her husband tended to the tire, Marta explored the town's old adobe buildings. She walked past the empty Amargosa Hotel toward the largest building in town -- an abandoned theater.