Martin City Melodrama launches its 30th season at a new location in Olathe

Jeanne Beechwood is home — again.

Beechwood is the founder and guiding spirit of the Martin City Melodrama & Vaudeville Co., an eccentric troupe that specializes in satire, song parodies, take-offs of literary classics and sometimes meticulous re-creations of historic theatrical traditions.

As the company prepares to open its 30th season, it finds itself in a new venue at the Great Mall of the Great Plains in Olathe.

And for Beechwood and her crew, it’s like a breath of fresh air.

The company began life at an old church that later became a bar that was literally in Martin City, just off 135th Street and Holmes Road. Escalating maintenance costs and landlord indifference eventually forced Beechwood to find a new home. After a couple of seasons at different venues, the company settled into a space at Metcalf South Shopping Center in Overland Park.

“We were there for 14 years on a month-to-month lease,” Beechwood said.

The Metcalf South mall, which opened in 1967, closed in September, although Sears and the Glenwood Arts Theatre are still open.

Beechwood said the hunt for a new home took her and her assistants all over the area. They visited the Great Mall more than once, but only on their second visit did they discover the former bar that would become the company’s new home base.

For years Metcalf South was considered a dead mall. The Great Mall isn’t dead, but the number of empty retail spaces there speaks to better times. Even so, there are signs of life. Dickinson Theatres operates a 16-screen multiplex, and the mall has places to eat and a fair number of shops.

The new space will seat 195 and give the company room to breathe. Martin City’s new home covers 4,750 square feet.

The mall has also given the company two big storage areas which together comprise 5,000 more square feet. (Beechwood and her husband, Dan Hall, also maintain two houses in east Kansas City that are packed to the gills with props, scenery and costumes.) The new space affords 11 drop lines, from which expanses of scenery can be hung.

Best of all for Beechwood, there’s enough space for her to bring back a visual mainstay of the original location — an elaborately painted, Victorian-flavored drop by artist Don Carlton depicting a 19th-century locomotive coming down the tracks. Beechwood is still using chairs and cabaret tables original to the first Martin City location.

Through the years, Beechwood said, she has been able to hang on to a loyal audience. The theater maintains a mailing list of about 6,000 and attracts an annual attendance of 30,000. She hopes the new location may pick up additional fans from south Johnson County.

Without question, the space will make life easier for Martin City. And Beechwood said locating in a mall has big advantages. That was true at Metcalf South and will be at the Great Mall.

“A nice thing for a theater to be in a mall is, we don’t have to shovel snow, we don’t have to provide security,” she said.

But she won’t miss Metcalf South. The stage there posed a 14-year challenge for anyone directing a Martin City show: a vertical iron support beam thrusting from the stage floor to the ceiling near the middle of the stage. Every show had to be blocked around it.

When Beechwood speaks of it now, she sounds like someone who has had an aching tooth removed. Now she can look forward to staging shows that were impossible in what qualified as one of the most awkward theater spaces in the Kansas City area.

“I have a great ‘Moby Dick’ that Dan adapted,” she said. “The puppet pieces are huge. There’s no way we could have done it at Metcalf. … This place has opened up real possibilities.”

This story was originally published October 9, 2014 at 3:00 AM with the headline "Martin City Melodrama launches its 30th season at a new location in Olathe."