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The exterior of the Amargosa Opera House was also shown in the movies The Hitcher and Carl Colpaert's Delusion. The exterior of the adjacent cafe and hotel colonnade were shown in a 40 second segment of Robert Plant's video of his 1983 song, Big Log. The interior of the Opera House features in the video of the Lighthouse Family's song "Lifted". The Amargosa Hotel is open year-round for visitors from all over the world.
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Over the years, the opera house attracted larger audiences and became a quirky, cultural destination in the middle of the desert. Although Ms. Becket gave her last performance in 2012 and passed away in 2017 at age 92, her legacy continues thanks to another ballerina. Jenna McClintock saw a performance when she was six years old and was inspired to start training in ballet. After a career with the Oakland Ballet, Jenna returned to thank Marta, and decided to stay and maintain the tradition.
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Mosaic Canyon is one of the scenic highlights of Death Valley, and its marbled narrows are navigable for all ages. The trail shows off plenty of colourful slick rock and polished marble as it winds up a narrow, high-walled canyon. Aeons of time and countless flash floods have ground and polished its walls into the kind of marble you might covet for your home’s bathroom tiles. Embedded in the walls are vivid examples of Mosaic Breccia, multi-coloured rock fragments that look like they’re cemented together. Keep walking to discover smooth walls that narrow and widen, and ultimately end at a dry waterfall.
What are the check-in and check-out times at Amargosa Opera House & Hotel?
At the same time, Opotowsky was also kind and compassionate when warranted, she said. A keen chronicler of the world around him, he was creating journalism up until the end of his life, she said. He was rightly known for being unsparingly direct, said Kris Lovekin, a former education reporter at the Press-Enterprise.
For two decades the duo performed together to the delight of audiences, until his death from a stroke in 2005 at age seventy-six. After his death, Becket—who considers Willet to be her soul mate—asked the audience to imagine “Wilget” clowning around on stage when she was herself silent or offstage. Amargosa Opera House and Hotel is a historic building and cultural center located in Death Valley Junction, in eastern Inyo County, California near Death Valley National Park. Taylor was a principal dancer for the New York City Ballet until joining the L.A. Dance Project in 2016, where she has continued her stellar career as a dancer, rehearsal director and choreographer.
Several of the hotel rooms are adorned with cherubs, peacock feathers and statues. In Room 22, a ballerina dances on a ball while acrobats perform as a special dedication to Red Skelton (a close friend of Marta's) who was a guest in this room on several occasions. Death Valley is full of surprises and oddities, such as the fact that this arid, desolate valley was once part of a massive freshwater lake. A remnant of this lake is found at Salt Creek, where freshwater converted to salt water as the giant lake dried up about 10,000 years ago.
The hotel served as a very nice place to stay for both company executives and visiting investors, who were met at the train with white-gloved valets after a long and hot train ride. In addition to the hotel rooms, the cafe and a restaurant within the hotel, other rooms were bunkhouses for workers, an infirmary, a general store and what is now the Opera House, which was mostly used for showing films. Today, Marta’s legacy continues through performances in her Opera House.
Tours focus on the auditorium whose walls Marta personally adorned with fanciful murals showing an audience she imagined might have attended an opera in the 16th century, including nuns, gypsies and royalty. The structure itself was built by the Pacific Borax Company and once the social hub of Death Valley Junction until falling into disrepair after 1948. It sits right on the spot where Hwys 127, 178 and 190 collide (called Death Valley Junction), about 30 miles east of Furnace Creek. A large gas station and garage across from the cafe was the only location in the area for repairs of trucks hauling borax out of the mines, in addition to passenger car repairs. When the Tonopah and Tidewater Railroad ceased to be economical in 1942, the tracks were torn up completely and sent to Egypt, where the railroad was set up again to aid the Allied military effort in north Africa. Once the railroad stopped, the Opera House, Hotel and about 250 acres of land changed hands many times, until Marta Becket arrived on the scene.
Satisfied with the effect she spent another two years painting the ceiling with billowing white clouds across a blue sky that are framed with a collection of plump cherubs and a medallion of 16 seated ladies, each performing a different antique instrument at its center. While exploring abandoned adobe buildings in an area now known as Death Valley Junction, near the southeast boundary of the park, Marta came upon what appeared to be a performance space. “The building seemed to be saying, ‘Take me—do something with me.’” The next day, she and her husband did, renting the space for $45 a month.
Death Valley opera house and hotel recovers from ‘unprecedented’ storm damage - Las Vegas Review-Journal
Death Valley opera house and hotel recovers from ‘unprecedented’ storm damage.
Posted: Mon, 25 Sep 2023 07:00:00 GMT [source]
For an hour I watched this constant stream of borax as it slid down into the hungry crushers, and I listened to the chalk-faced operator who yelled in my ear. The most significant thing he said was that men did not last long at such labor, and in the mines six months appeared to be the limit of human endurance. When the town of Amargosa was booming due to the Borax mining business, and its position at the terminus of the Tonopah and Tidewater Railroad, about 350 people lived in the town.
New York City ballerina and Broadway dancer Marta Becket was camping with her husband in Death Valley, California when their trailer got a flat, sending them to Death Valley Junction for service. One can imagine this slight woman, so obviously multitalented, painstakingly painting unassisted on rickety scaffolding within this tiny rustic theater in the middle of the desert. Viewers should consider the room’s illustrated surfaces and her performances as a whole.
Traditional performing arts including acoustic music, theatrical plays, opera and spoken word are held on every weekend during the season (October through May). The Ahmanson will welcome “Parade” (June 17-July 12), the touring production of the Tony-winning Broadway revival. The opera house looked like something you would expect to see in an old town in Europe, not in the middle of the California desert. During one tour, the couple decided to camp between shows for a week at the Furnace Creek campground in Death Valley National Monument. The year was 1967 and the interest for performance programs of her ilk was dwindling fast due to the profound upheaval in 1960s popular culture.
Johnson had invested in Scott’s gold mining schemes and the two became friends. Scott told anyone who would listen that the $2 million castle was built with his gold mining profits. She grew up to become a dancer herself and was drawn back to the desert to perform. Like Ms. Becket, Ms. McClintock’s vision is to live and share her art and hopes to inspire others to do the same.
Amargosa Opera House is located in Death Valley Junction at the intersection of State Line Road and Highway 127. It is hard to miss as it is the only thing in the entire area, and it takes up a couple of blocks. There is parking in the dirt outside of the hotel and the opera house. Several years ago McClintock returned to meet with Becket to express her gratitude for inspiring her own dance career.
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