MEDORA, N.D. — For hundreds of miles out past Fargo, heading west on Interstate 94 through North Dakota, the terrain is gently sloping prairie. The sky is enormous, with nothing to obstruct the view, so if a storm is coming there’s drama in the clouds bearing down. Sunflower fields pop up, vast and Technicolor-yellow like an alternate vision of Oz, and every so often there’s a pump jack, bobbing for oil. But most of the scenery has a lulling sameness.
“Barely even a tree,” said Roger Rettig, a British musician who has spent 13 summers in Medora, a tiny outpost near the Montana line. “Then suddenly in the last — what is it, 10 miles before you get to Medora? Suddenly you gasp. The landscape totally changes, and you’ve got all that erosion and the buttes and canyons. It’s like you’ve jumped a thousand miles in a few yards and gone somewhere entirely different.”
It’s a leap into the American West: the part of the country that feels like a cowboy movie, a place of bison and wild horses, where you may actually see antelope play. These are the Badlands, whose remote and moody geography seems a spectacularly unlikely setting for a long-running stage show, let alone one that attracts an average of nearly 1,200 people each night.
But such is the curious phenomenon of the Medora Musical, a spangled summertime revue performed in an amphitheater carved into the side of a butte, with the Badlands as its backdrop. Part country music jamboree, part variety show, it’s a wholesome cousin to the loosely scripted entertainment you find at theme parks, a respite from the long lines to get on the thrill rides.
The musical is also a homage — to the nature-loving 26th president, Theodore Roosevelt, who ranched for a while nearby, and, obscurely, to the North Dakota businessman who introduced Mr. Bubble, the bath soap, to the world.
In Medora, estimated population 132, the closest thing to a traffic jam is the post-show line of cars that snake down the hillside from the parking lot, red taillights aglow. The crowds have been coming since 1965, and when this season wraps up on Sept. 9, the producers expect attendance for 2017 to have passed 116,000.
“I’ve probably played to a million and a half people up there,” Mr. Rettig, the pedal steel guitarist in the onstage band, said one recent morning. And yes, he knows that’s a crazy number for such an isolated place.
Off the Exit, Into the Past
It’s the Interstate that makes it possible. There are a lot of bus tours, for one thing. But many of the people who stop in Medora, an oasis nestled against the rugged southern edge of Theodore Roosevelt National Park, are road-tripping to or from other national parks farther west: Glacier or Yellowstone.
Off the freeway, down the winding road into town, there’s some Old West history waiting to be absorbed, and not only at the North Dakota Cowboy Hall of Fame. Outside the Billings County Courthouse Museum, a photo from 1895 shows Medora’s “Hanging Tree” with multiple bodies dangling from its branches. It’s a chilling image even after you learn, from the accompanying text, that these are effigies of jurors whose not-guilty verdict in a murder trial didn’t go over well with the locals.
The Medora Musical, predictably, presents a cheerier version of the past, though it’s maybe not the past that you’d expect. As a town, Medora is selling immersion in a West that is part old-time fantasy (like the stagecoach rides you can take near the Little Missouri River), part awe-inspiring natural environment, part kitsch.
Kristi Reinke, 38, a middle school geography teacher from Minot, N.D., has traveled more than three hours to Medora every summer of her life except the one year she lived on the East Coast. Her parents honeymooned in Medora, and when their family visits now it’s a four-generation affair, always including the musical.
Full-price admission to the show starts at about $16 for children, and adult premium seats top out at $49.95, but Ms. Reinke snaps up discounted tickets in the post-Thanksgiving Cyber Monday sale. Then she has all winter to look forward to using them.
“For us it’s just tradition,” she said. “When I sit down there, I think of my parents sitting there 47 years ago.” And it is touching to her that her own three children have come to love the same unpretentious getaway that she enjoyed growing up. “They don’t say, ‘Let’s go to Hawaii.’ They say, ‘When are we going to Medora?’”
Spectacle, With Horses
When you glide down the set of outdoor escalators into the 2,850-seat Burning Hills Amphitheater, where the set is a fresh-scrubbed mini Medora streetscape, the first thing that’s striking is the view. Beyond the stage, in the near distance, is a bluff doing an excellent impression of a scaled-down Hollywood hill. Here, though, the sign on it in big white letters spells MEDORA.
With fireworks and a six horses at the ready, the production itself is more spectacle than theater — though the dry summer and consequent burn ban have meant fewer pyrotechnics than usual. Backed up by the dozen-strong Burning Hills Singers, the crooning host is a 32-year-old from suburban Minneapolis named Chet Wollan, who goes by Cowboy Chet in the show.
His co-host is Bill Sorensen, a former mayor of Bismarck who specializes in genially hokey humor, the kind designed to make the children in the audience laugh, too. The production’s theme this year is heroes, who are mentioned early and often; Cowboy Chet’s first song is “My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys.”
What’s startling about the revue is how uncannily it feels like 1970s broadcast television, the sort of variety show where you might see the Osmonds or Bob Hope — only here you’re side by side with families snuggled under blankets against the chill, some with tubs of popcorn in their laps.
“It goes along the old ‘Hee Haw’ T.V. show principle,” said Mr. Rettig, who at 74 is making this his last summer in Medora, where the insidious dust from the hills seeps so deep into his guitar that at season’s end, on his way home to Florida, he takes it to Nashville for cleaning. “When I saw a clip of ‘Hee Haw’ back in England, I thought, I can’t believe they watch this stuff. I mean, it’s so corny it’s just beyond corny. But, you know, it tickles something, and the thing ran and ran. And so does the Medora Musical.”
The national anthem is part of the revue’s first half, with the audience standing to face a flag. The surprise, when I looked around, was how few people were joining in the song. Most of what we heard was the cast, their voices as heavily miked as they are in the rest of the show: a necessity given the wind, which makes sound a different challenge every night.
The horses in the Medora Musical make their appearance early on, in a vignette depicting Roosevelt’s charge at the Battle of San Juan Hill. But the production’s one truly jaw-dropping moment comes later when a horse and rider climb the bluff beyond the stage in the dusk and are lit atop it against an evening sky. It’s an extraordinarily dramatic use of landscape — and the kind of visual that makes you wonder what potential the show could have if seriously deep-pocketed producers ever took the reins. But then it might not be the Medora Musical anymore.
Staying the Same, Differently
In the welcome center off the parking lot, alongside the souvenirs (the most adorable, hands down, being the Official Badlands Teddy Bear, with fringed jacket and pince-nez), is an endearingly homely model of the amphitheater the way it used to be, before reconstruction in the early 1990s. “It was dirt paths with benches that were not level,” recalled Mr. Wollan, who grew up going to Medora in the summertime.
Begun by Harold Schafer, the founder of the Gold Seal Company (thus the Mr. Bubble connection), the Medora Musical was always intended to attract tourists. But Curt Wollan, Chet Wollan’s father and the musical’s longtime director and executive producer, said that 60 percent of the audience comes from the region: North Dakota, eastern Montana, northern South Dakota, southern Canada. Or as he put it from Minnesota, where he lives: “Cowboy country.”
Many spectators come year after year, so the show is different each summer: new songs, new routines. As of last year, there is also one night off a month for the performers — a big increase from zero. And this year they are living not in an old motel 15 miles away, as they did for decades, but in a little cabin compound in the campground below the theater.
Yet the musical doesn’t dare change too much. In keeping with the wishes of Schafer, who died in 2001, there is always a patriotic section, always some gospel music, always a part where the children in the crowd clamber up onstage. A guest act (on the night I was there, a team of acrobats) is an integral part of the mix. There is always the charge at San Juan Hill.
Mr. Rettig, a liberal who chooses his words carefully in conservative North Dakota, believes that escapism is essential to the show’s appeal. “I don’t necessarily disapprove of that: the fact that people want to see something that could be a time capsule from 30 years ago,” he said. “Because they liked their life a little better then.”
Still, he said, there was the summer that his friend Mr. Sorensen did a magic trick — “something that looked a bit Harry Potter-like” — and an audience member complained on religious grounds. “They took it out of the show in the end.”
Other touchy elements remain. Spectators have sometimes objected to the gospel-music segment because other religions are not represented, Curt Wollan said, while the patriotic bits are sensitive in a way they didn’t used to be. He means them simply to celebrate the nation.
“I think the left is as patriotic as the right,” he said. “So I try to stay apolitical; I don’t want to get involved in that out there.”
Reverence for God, country and family is solidly built into the production, though, and that is apparently how the fans want it.
“They like what they like about this show,” said the younger Mr. Wollan, who met his wife — Candice Lively Wollan, a Tennessee native and the Medora Musical’s female lead — at Dollywood, Dolly Parton’s theme park in Pigeon Forge, Tenn., in a production his father was directing.
Like “Phantom of the Opera,” the Medora Musical has its die-hards, who come over and over each season and bring cookies for the cast. Chet Wollan in particular is instantly recognizable to fans, even on shopping trips to Dickinson, a city of 23,000 about a half-hour away. “He said he got hugged three times at Walmart the other day,” Ms. Wollan said, and laughed. “We’re almost famous to them, which is so bizarre, because we’re not anybody.”
For Medora, though, the revue is hugely important — and the Theodore Roosevelt Medora Foundation, which presents it, is trying to build on its success by bringing in more live performance: a solo show by a little-known Broadway veteran, Jared Mason; a Roosevelt bio-play; a gospel brunch featuring singers from the musical.
As Labor Day nears, audiences at the amphitheater grow, and Medora bustles. But as soon as the musical closes, Ms. Wollan said, the place goes quiet.
“It’s a weird, weird vibe the next day,” she said. “Turns into a ghost town for sure.”
