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Death Valley’s amazing diva and the Amargosa Opera House - Page 2

© Brian Salisbury

She peered inside and saw several rows of wooden benches facing a small stage. Dust and debris covered the theater's warped and buckled floor.

It would be an understatement to say the experience profoundly affected Marta. It actually became the driving force in her life from that point on.

The next day, the couple struck a deal with Death Valley Junction's town manager. They'd rent the theater for $45.00 a month and handle all repairs themselves. Originally called Corkhill Hall, Marta renamed the theater the Amargosa Opera House.

The Pacific Coast Borax Company built the theater and everything else in Death Valley Junction during the early 1920s. The U-shaped complex of Mexican colonial style adobe buildings housed the company's offices, store, dormitory, 23-room hotel and dining room. The theater doubled as a community center for dances, church services, movies, funerals and town meetings.

When the mining company moved out, the abandoned town drifted into ruin.

Marta gave her first performance at the Amargosa Opera House on February 10, 1968. With rain beating down outside, she danced, sang and acted for an audience of 12. From then until only recently, the doors of the Amargosa Opera House opened without fail every Friday, Saturday and Monday night at 7:45 p.m., and the curtain parted at 8:15 p.m. Currently, the theatre presents one performance a week on Saturday night.

At first, audiences consisted of a smattering of area residents and tourists, and sometimes no one at all. Regardless, the show went on. Marta danced and sang -- even when the house was empty.

But, when word of Marta's unique one-woman revue in the desert began to spread, people visiting Death Valley National Park began visiting the opera house too. Busloads of foreign tourists added the opera house to their itineraries. And others seeking an escape from Las Vegas's high-octane glitz, traveled the 75-miles to Death Valley Junction to take in Marta's performances.

National Geographic did an article about Marta that helped immensely to publicize the opera house.

But even these significant successes didn't guarantee a packed house every time the curtains parted. To remedy this situation, in 1968 Marta decided to fill the theater permanently by painting her own eclectic audience on the building's walls. Four years later, colorfully clad 16th century nobles, monks and nuns, along with bullfighters, gypsies, opera characters and even Marta's two cats adorned every vertical surface inside the theater.

She then spent two more years on a scaffold painting the ceiling with even more characters.

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