Marta Becket (born on August 9, 1924) had been an artist, dancer, and performer in New York City, a ballerina in the corps de ballet at Radio City Music Hall and on Broadway.

Married in 1962, Marta Becket and her husband found themselves in California, in the spring of 1967, after months of touring. They decided to spend a week's vacation camping in Death Valley, behind the visitor's center. One morning they awoke to a flat tire on their trailer. A park ranger directed them to Death Valley Junction to have the tire repaired. While her husband attended to the tire, Marta began to explore the old adobe buildings. Walking down the long colonnade of what was known as the Amargosa Hotel, she was hypnotically drawn to the end, and around the corner where she discovered the largest building in the row. At the back of the building, she found a hole in a door, where she could see inside. She saw the auditorium of the Pacific Coast Borax Company that had been built between 1923-25, and had long been abandoned, and a small stage with faded calico curtains hanging from a track.

This find led her to leave New York permanently. The next day Marta and her husband located the town manager and agreed to rent the theater for $45.00 a month, and to assume responsibility for repairs. Originally called Corkhill Hall, she renamed the theater the Amargosa Opera House.

Marta began hosting performances and dance classes for the scattered local families near Death Valley Junction. She gave her first performance in the theater on February 10th, 1968. On that rainy night, she danced for an audience of twelve adults, children and grandchildren. Sometimes she would perform for 5 people or even to an empty room. One day Marta decided she always wanted an audience in her auditorium, so she would paint an entire audience on the walls of the theater.
It took four years to complete the murals on the walls to portray the audience of a night at the opera from the 16th century. There is the king and queen in royal attendance each night, along with the social butterflies of nobility, monks and nuns, gypsies, and even bullfighters and Indians, all caught in the act of life at the opera, painted beautifully upon these walls. Then Marta started work on the ceiling, which took another two years and was completed in 1974.

Her Opera House creations, along with the murals she has painted in the hotel, have made the Amargosa Opera House a one-of-a-kind irreplaceable cultural resource and people were coming to see her and the murals from Las Vegas, California and New York. The doors of the Amargosa Opera House would opened without fail at 7:45 pm and the curtain parted promptly at 8:15 pm every Friday, Saturday, and Monday night for many years.

Marta Becket is almost 90 years old now and after a few years break from performing due to her health problems, returned to the stage on Sunday, November 10, 2013. Now she dropped the dancing to perform weekly "The Sitting Down Show".

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