Drama Behind Melodrama No Act

Call the melodrama in Moorpark and you’ll get an earful of one.

“We are currently dark, indefinitely. We don’t know when we’ll be reopening but we’ll be picking up messages once or twice a day . . . for a while. . . .”

The woman on the tape is Linda Bredemann, proprietor of what was once known as the Magnificent Moorpark Melodrama and Vaudeville Company. No Dastardly Dan has tied her to the track--life has so few really wonderful villains--but she’s strapped all the same.

The bank is breathing down her neck, threatening foreclosure. Last year, she sold her house--the second she’s had to sell--to keep the theater going. She also maxed out her credit cards. Her two most recent trips to Santa Barbara involved meetings with her bankruptcy attorney. On the way back from one of them last week, she had a flat.

A few weeks ago, Bredemann asked the city of Moorpark for financial help. No decision was made but the response was something less than two thumbs up. So, for practical purposes, Bredemann considers herself done with her invigorating, excruciating 13-year run--or as a character in one of her productions might have proclaimed: “Done, done, done, I tell you! DONE!”

“I’m done crying,” she said. “There’s nothing more I can do.”

If someone wants to buy the 71-year-old theater on Moorpark’s High Street, Bredemann gladly would hire on as artistic director. Even without the theater, she’d be thrilled to stage a melodrama for your next 80th birthday party, shareholders meeting, romantic dinner for two or any other event that might benefit from an infusion of outrageous fun.

Until then, it’s curtains.

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As the rain drummed down, Bredemann sat in the theater’s box office trying to talk about the drama behind the melodrama.

But she was interrupted.

A man on the phone wanted tickets for the classic rock group Papa Doo Run Run, which was booked for May.

“Actually, we’ve closed down,” Bredemann told him.

A Simi Valley official called with discouraging news. While Bredemann’s life has been the theater, she has made her living in recent years off a shop next door called the Costume Annex. The official told her a costume-rental shop wouldn’t be legal in a space she was eyeing in Simi Valley.

The beer man came by and told her the company couldn’t take back the brew she had on hand.

“It’s good beer,” he reminded her.

“Maybe I’ll have to gather all the actors and have a party,” she said.

Bredemann loves to entertain. Of course, that’s how she wound up in a cold office on a gloomy afternoon, attending to the countless details of laying her dreams to rest.

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It was Mother’s Day in 1985. Living in the Santa Rosa Valley, Bredemann told her husband, Harvey, and her two children that nothing would do but a trip to the melodrama. Eyes rolled.

The production was “Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.” The Bredemanns loved it. After cheering and booing at a half-dozen shows over the next year, Linda and Harvey were hooked. With profits from their two businesses--a swimming pool company and a construction firm, they bought the theater from the Moorpark College art teacher who ran it.

“I thought: ‘Oh boy, I can have a party every week,’ ” Bredemann recalled. “And I did.”

But the good times that came with productions like “Phantom of the Melodrama” and “Gone With the Gust” had their cost.

During their first year, the Bredemanns had to sell their commercial property in the San Fernando Valley to pay the bills.

During their second, they had to sell their house.

Eventually, the strain of running the theater wrecked their marriage. Linda and Harvey divorced but remained close. He took care of business, buttonholing tour operators and putting the word out to corporate groups. She directed, occasionally taking a turn as a tap-dancer.

“I had a great time, the actors had a great time, and the audience could see it,” she said. A dozen actor couples met on the Moorpark stage and later married. Business boomed. Saturday nights were sellouts.

Then Harvey got sick. Suffering from cancer, he died in Linda’s arms two years ago.

The rest is a familiar story in the annals of small-business failures.

Emotionally shattered, Linda sold the business to a comedy writer with big plans. Show business being what it is, she had it back--and a huge debt to boot--in six months.

Now Bredemann has her own plans. She’s intent on keeping her costume shop open. She’s thinking about a job as a cruise director--a gig recommended by one of her former actresses who now treads the boards on the high seas. And she wants to sell the theater, listed at $625,000.

From the light room high above its 306 empty seats, Bredemann illuminated the stage. It still had props from the last production, “E.R.

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Steve Chawkins is a Times staff writer. His e-mail address is steve.chawkins@latimes.com.