By Kathy Feist
Wearing a colorful pink ensemble, matching oversized eyeglasses, dark felt hat and fuzzy vest, Jeanne Beechwood discusses her career in the theater industry. She holds a tiny pekingese also arrayed in pink on her lap.
“Everything, to me, is a show,” she states.
The colorful and talented actress/playwright/stage director/theater owner has been producing shows at Martin City Melodrama and Vaudeville Co. for the past four decades.
Starting Saturday, December 7, Beechwood will kick off the theater’s 40th season with “The 12 Days (and Dogs) of Christmas! A Pawsitive Howliday Experience.” The performance runs every weekend until January 1st at the Martin City Melodrama Theater in Grandview.
Borrowing from a one-woman Broadway act “The 12 Dates of Christmas” Beechwood creates a spoof on the storyline, featuring senior rescue dogs from area shelters for her Christmas “dates.”
Other than backstage help, Beechwood makes her first solo appearance at the theater, a one-woman show.
“I was nervous at first because I’ve not done a one-woman show on my own main stage,” she confesses. However, after seeing a one-woman performance of the Titanic during Kansas City’s Fringe Festival, she gained confidence. “I thought, if she can do a one woman show on the Titanic, I can do a one-woman show with my 40 years of experience and my dogs.”
If you haven’t been to a melodrama performance, the classic artform combines an over-the-top storyline with witty one-liners, exaggerated characters, zany plots, and an almost cartoon-like setting. The plays at Martin City Melodrama are written and produced by Beechwood.
Clearly, no one in the area does it as well as Beechwood who honed her craft over 40 years ago while working at a melodrama in California. At the age of 26, she decided to bring the concept home to Kansas City, finding a theater in Martin City in 1985 and providing audience members with side-splitting laughter and a fried chicken dinner (fresh from RC’s). It was the hottest entertainment going in Kansas City at the time. Performances were sold out weeks in advance.
Over the years, Martin City Melodrama moved throughout the metropolitan area, from Metcalf Shopping Center to the Mall of the Great Plains to Crown Center and finally to a donated “fur-ever” home along Blue Ridge Boulevard in Grandview.
In that time, Beechwood dealt with life’s blows: a painful divorce from her husband and theater partner, the associated financial woes that come with divorce, the separation of family and the loss of her home.
“I loved being a mother,” she says. “I just loved it!”
That pain created a shift for Beechwood and the theater company. “Emotionally, I needed something to embrace,” she says.
Beechwood began working with actors with special needs thanks to a request from the Lakemary Center, a provider of day and residential services to adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities. “I had never worked with special needs before,” she recalls. “When I walked in, there were 40 smiling faces, and I thought, you treat them like anyone else… actually better than anyone else.”
Once just a side job, the program has now developed into a branch of Martin City Melodrama called Top Bananas!, incorporating individuals with special needs from a variety of organizations. Like her other productions, Beechwood writes, directs and acts in the plays while also playfully and expertly working with the aspiring group of actors. The plays are written to showcase each individual’s special talent, making the experience a thoroughly enjoyable one.
Beechwood says one of those actors, Tim Bartow, a talented singer with cerebral palsy, may make special appearances during her Christmas show.
Beechwood also announced her newest collaboration: providing a creative outlet in the form of acting for special needs adults employed at Job One in Independence.
While Martin City Melodrama has taken a more inclusive role with special needs actors, so too has it slowly incorporated senior rescue dogs into the act.
“I was doing a spoof of Swan Lake, when I put my little dog, Charlie, in a tutu and had him jump up for lunch meat during the music [number],” she says. “The audience went crazy, and I thought, huh, I might be onto something.”
The small dogs wear costumes in true melodrama fashion and perhaps due to their age, easily comply with Beechwood’s directions. Sometimes, their performance involves sitting in an amusing prop or being held.
Though Martin City Melodrama has taken a more decidedly compassionate route, the plays are still a force of comedy, delivering quick one-liners, outlandishly silly storylines, clever musical numbers and colorful stage backdrops and costumes.
“My mission when I first started was to be able to keep myself employed in theater…and produce family entertainment,” she recalls. “Now, as much as I am creative and everything’s a show, I always have to be taking care of something. That is my joy.”
Performances of “The 12 Days (and Dogs) of Christmas! A Pawsitive Howliday Experience” are every Saturday and Sunday at various times between December 7 and January 1st.
Tickets are $10 and can be purchased online at martincitymelodrama.org.
Martin City Melodrama is located at 702 Blue Ridge Extension in Grandview, just a 5 minute drive from Martin City.
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