The Great American Melodrama has entertained crowds for 50 years. How the show keeps going on
California’s Central Coast has lots of venues for performing arts, plays and concerts — including The Great American Melodrama Theatre, which has staged productions for 50 years on the southernmost edge of San Luis Obispo County.
Wait! A theater in Oceano? For five decades?
The location might seem incongruous for a beloved performing arts institution. Oceano, a town of about 7,200 people, is 24 miles from San Luis Obispo and about 80 miles from Santa Barbara, two of the area’s more prominent, performance-loving cities.
Despite the distance, something’s obviously working well at the Melodrama despite the unusual location.
The theater has helped launch several major careers through the years, including for Zac Efron, Kelly McGillis of “Top Gun” fame, Leslie Jordan from “Will & Grace” and Broadway star Patrick Page.
Over the years, other well-known entertainers on their way to or from Los Angeles would stop to do one-nighter gigs “to fill in one midweek evening at our theater,” co-founder Anet Carlin told The Tribune. They included such stars as Vince Gill and Alison Krauss.
And the fun continues on to this day. At the Oceano theater, the audience still can eat at their seats, boo and cheer the performers, and always laugh long and loud.
The legacy Melodrama theater, due east of adjacent Highway 1 at 1863 Front St., launched its 50th anniversary season Jan. 31 with its first-ever production of the uproariously successful, 27-year-old musical, “Guys on Ice.”
The hit ice-fishing bromance will run until March 8.
There’ll be 7 p.m. performances Thursdays and Fridays, 2 p.m. matinees and 7 p.m. shows on Saturdays and 6 p.m. shows on Sundays.
As the new season starts, the longtime owners, employees and fans of the intimate theater looked back on the Melodrama’s changes, challenges and its many performances over the past five decades.
Oceano Melodrama started thanks to PCPA and a far-fetched dream
So how did the Melodrama get its start?
John Schlenker had a dream of owning a melodrama theater like the ones he’d acted in as a young man in the mountain states.
The charismatic actor was lured to the new Pacific Conservatory Theater at Allan Hancock College in 1969 by founder Donovan Marley.
Schlenker fell in love with the area and, so he could stay here year round, he wound up teaching theater arts, English and more at Ernest Righetti High School in Santa Maria.
Later, he also taught at Santa Maria High School and some classes at Cal Poly, Cuesta College and Hancock.
One day in early 1975, sitting on a local pier, Schlenker told pal Anet Carlin: “I’m thinking about opening a theater.”
“John, you’re crazy,” she responded. “But where?”
When he said Oceano, Carlin countered with “You’re REALLY crazy AND silly!”
He got much the same response from a local loan officer, according to the woman he would marry four years later, now Lynne Schlenker.
“The banker told him ‘If you wanted to buy a race horse, I’d probably give you the money,’”she said. “‘But a theater in Oceano? Not a chance.’”
Despite Carlin’s initial misgivings, she matched Schlenker’s $5,000 initial investment to become his business partner in the new $10,000 venture.
“We both brought different things to the table,” she said, adding with a grin, “He told me I was the power, because he still had to work to support his family.”
After the Schlenkers married in 1979, they had twin girls a year later.
Theirs was a hectic lifestyle with the babies, Lynne Schlenker’s two young sons and all the varied responsibilities of the theater, up to and including cleaning out the actors’ rental housing after the show closed and the performers and crew left the area, heading for their next gig.
“Theater is always such a collaborative art,” Carlin said, “and it’s always provided me with a family.”
She credited John Schlenker with “extraordinary skill at bringing such high-caliber talent to the theater,” and Lynne Schlenker with “fiscal responsibility, costuming skill and amazing tenacity” — attributes that helped keep the venture going through the years.
“It was awful, it was wonderful, it was unbelievable — and they’re still doing it,” Carlin said. “They did it, and I’m really proud of them.”
Theater owners open second location near Bakersfield
When they started it, Schlenker and Carlin thought it would be a summer-stock melodrama theater, especially since it’s only about mile from the entrance to the Oceano Dunes State Vehicular Recreation Area.
Enter the audience, stage right. The public loved the theater so much that, by the next summer season, the partners had decided to make it a year-round enterprise.
It worked and succeeded, but it hasn’t been easy.
The partners took an eastward turn in 1983, spending $280,000 to launch another Great American Melodrama, this one in a former Sprouse-Reitz building in Oildale, near Bakersfield.
“So many of our patrons came over from Bakersfield, we figured they’d enjoy having our theater closer to them,” Lynne Schlenker said.
It didn’t work out that way.
“It was like pulling teeth to get them to come out to the theater there,” she said. “We hadn’t realized that for our Valley patrons, going to our theater was part of their vacation tradition, as they got out of the heat and the fog.”
“We tried to do there what we did with the first one,” Carlin said. “We had stepped through a window in time. In the Valley, it didn’t work.”
Eventually, they sold the second theater at a loss and spent years recovering financially from the blow, Lynne Schlenker said.
Even so, the Oceano theater kept on going, stopping only during the COVID-19 pandemic years.
Melodrama has stayed in same location through the years — with upgrades
The Great American Melodrama Theater is still in the same unlikely location — a former Rexall drugstore building from the 1950s.
Why there?
“The rent was cheap,” Lynne Schlenker said succinctly.
Proximity also played a part. Carlin lived in the neighboring Halcyon township and, for a time, Schlenker was in Santa Maria.
The duo bought the property in the early 1980s from the pharmacist couple who owned it.
There have been lots of changes in the decades since then, however.
Soon after Carlin’s son was born, the Schlenkers bought her out in 1988.
Since then, Carlin — also a co-founder of PCPA, she said — opened six other community theaters, including one in her home that, in 10 years, raised $90,000 for the community in Atascadero.
In 2011, the Schlenkers upgraded the Melodrama’s rustic theater structure, including its kitchen, restrooms, sidewalks and other areas. They also added a lobby area and expanded the family-friendly concession stand and its menu to serve beer and wine.
The theater building’s exterior is now a dramatic royal blue with deep, rust-red awnings.
In 2018, the Schlenkers created a new $2 million side building. It’s a two-story, 14,000-square-foot structure next door to the theater that accommodates rehearsals, administrative functions, storage and more.
“No more paying rent on storage units,” Lynne Schlenker said.
Since then, they’ve also bought nearby housing for traveling actors.
It has been, as Lynne Schlenker describes it, “a wild ride.”
The Melodrama’s owners didn’t do it alone
The Melodrama has had a good run of very helpful staffers to keep things running smoothly.
One crucial part of the glue that kept the Melodrama moving forward was longtime, if somewhat nomadic, employee Eric Hoit, a Phi Beta Cappa Stanford University grad who was directing “Pippin” there.
He joined the Melodrama as an actor in 1979, and since then has filled roles from choreographer to bookkeeper. Now semi-retired, Hoit is the part-time business manager and go-to person with reams of institutional knowledge about the theater.
“We’d found an all-around, brilliant human being,” Lynne Schlenker said of the man who left periodically for directing, acting, choreographing and other theatrical gigs, even going on a national tour.
In the past 45 years, he’s always come back.
“A lot of it had to do with the Central Coast,” Hoit told The Tribune. “It was my home base. I love this place, these people. I have great respect for them, how they treat us and the audiences.”
The shows must go on in Oceano
There have been changes, too, in the theater’s show topics, which have veered away somewhat from the classical “villain tying the heroine on the train tracks” themes.
“In the last 10 years, we’ve had maybe one Western-themed melodrama per season,” managing director Stacy Halverson told The Tribune. “A theater’s success is in its evolution.”
Halverson said some of it comes down to changes in audiences as well. The patronage has changed, too,” she said. “The old non-musical melodramas from days past probably wouldn’t appeal to today’s crowds.”
The theater’s playbill through 2025 includes a world premiere of a twisted English mystery, a send-up of the classic French “Les Miserables” into “Less Miserable,” “How the West was Really Won,” “Bonnie and Hyde,” and two spectaculars.
Hoit, meanwhile, will direct the English mystery, “Shut up, Sherlock.” Rehearsals start in two weeks, he said.
The 50th anniversary spectacular runs Aug. 8 through Sept. 20 with many chances to boo and cheer, followed by liberal helpings of song, dance and comedy. The show will highlight favorite numbers from the past while also including some new material.
Theatergoers in the know plan ahead to close out every year at the melodrama’s eternally favorite show, the Holiday Extravaganza, running Nov. 21 through Dec. 31.
Attendees see a “fairy tale operetta gone delightfully off the rails,” and then jingle along to seasonal music in the holiday vaudeville revue.
For Lynne Schlenker, now as in the past, her favorite thing is to “sit in the middle of the theater or stand in the bar line, knowing people don’t know who I am.”
“I can listen to what they’re saying,” she said. “I watch their faces as they see the show, watch them laugh and clap and see the glow on their faces.”
She added: “That’s when I know this is why we’ve done what we’ve done for as long as we’ve done it.”
This story was originally published February 8, 2025 at 5:00 AM.
