Cassville’s gala musical production, The Show, will mark its 32nd season this year, and when it debuted in 1992, Cassville residents Mary Beck and Trudy Nickle became two of its staunchest supporters.

“Mom came to every performance – Thursday, Saturday and Sunday — every year,” said Greg Beck, the brainchild behind The Show, as well as its director and the band’s drummer.

The Show’s bass player, Bruce Nickle, who has been plucking strings for the band since 1993, said his mother, Trudy, attended every Sunday afternoon performance, every year.

Not a bad record for two women who lived well into their nineties.

Mary Beck will ever be remembered as the lady who, from 1957-2020, taught the art of dance to generations of students in southwest Missouri.

With a taste for jazz, Mary Beck’s motto was, “If the music is good, you dance,” a sentence she inscribed on a wall in her former dance studio in Neosho.

Beck’s students loved her. According to Greg Beck, his mother began taking dance lessons as a young girl in Joplin, where she and her mother moved after her father’s death when she was 2 years old.

Around the time that Mary Beck was taking her first dance lessons, 13-year-old Edeltraud (“Trudy”) Anna Verderber and her sister were fleeing the bombing of their homeland in the German-occupied Czech Republic, during World War II.

“Their mother sent them across the Czech border into Austria on bicycles to escape to safety,” said Bruce Nickle.

In Austria, Trudy met a handsome young GI from Cassville named Doyle Nickle, who she married in 1948. Bruce was born a few years later.

After Doyle Nickle retired from the military in 1966, he and Trudy made their home in Cassville, on West Third Street, the same street where Mary Beck and her husband Bill (the love of her life) set up housekeeping after they married in 1949.

Greg Beck’s mother, Mary, began teaching dance students in her home: 10 at a time, Beck said. In 1957, she purchased a dance studio in Neosho, where 80 students were enrolled.

“In no time at all, she had 120 students,” Beck said.

Because a lot of Mary Beck’s students were from Pierce City, Monett and Aurora, she opened the Mary Beck School of Dance in Monett in 1961.

“She planned to close the Neosho school after she opened the Monett school, but she had so many upset students that she ended up keeping both studios open for 15 years,” Greg Beck said.

While Mary Beck taught dance, Trudy Nickle taught German for a year at Cassville High School.

“Mom had a teaching degree from a college in Austria, and German was her native tongue,” Bruce Nickle said.

Nickle said his mother was a firm believer that if you were going to a foreign country, you needed to learn to speak and read the language, and to take a citizenship test, as she did after she arrived in the United States.

After her teaching stint, Trudy became a devoted homemaker and served as a long-time volunteer at Mercy Hospital in Cassville, where she put the workout equipment to good use.

“When I was young, we lived just a couple of blocks away from where Greg Beck’s family lived,” Bruce Nickle said, “But, because Greg was a lot older, we didn’t hang out together much.”

Greg Beck graduated from Cassville High School one year ahead of Bruce Nickle. Both boys had in common an insatiable love for music.

Nickle, who had a knack for playing any stringed instrument he could get his hands on, was impressed throughout school with Beck’s musical abilities.

“Greg was always a topnotch drummer, and still is,” Nickle said.

Nickle and Beck formed their own separate bands during high school and churned out rock tunes from the 1960s into the 1970s.

“We sort of competed for gigs,” Nickle said.

In 1993, Nickle agreed to start hanging out more with his “much older” former neighbor, when Beck invited him to play in the band for his up-and-coming production, The Show, then preparing for its second season.

“I’ve regretted it ever since,” Beck quipped. “Bruce is sort of a left-hand man.”

Beck had the idea for The Show while he was part of a praise band at First Baptist Church in Cassville.

“I heard all of these fabulous guest vocalists, but, other than church, there was really nowhere else in town for them to perform,” said Beck, who remembers, in particular, Cassville resident Kathy Henderson, who had a “Carole King” voice.

“I asked my wife Brenda, ‘Why can’t we plan a Cassville show, something to showcase all of this talent that we have in our area?’ So that’s what we did,” said Beck, who had experience performing with a band based in Omaha.

Not everyone was optimistic about the success of such an endeavor in Cassville.

“[Pharmacist] Blake Whitley, a member of The Show’s band, told me the idea would never go over in Cassville, that there wouldn’t be enough interest,” Beck said.

Whitley was wrong. Bruce Nickle’s wife, Debbie, who has played keyboard and has served as a vocalist since The Show’s inception in 1992, said The Show has been an evolving process.

“Kind of like a big wheel,” she said.

“Greg will push a vocalist to their limits,” she said. “If you’re up to a challenge, join us, but don’t expect to sing an easy song. It won’t happen.”

The first Show featured a few Elvis numbers among its selection of 24 songs, and had four backup female and four backup male vocalists.

Over the years, core members of the band have grown from 4 musicians to 13.

In years past, some of Mary Beck’s dance students participated in The Show, notably, “The California Raisins” and a group who danced The Charleston.

Beck said this year’s performance will feature a quintet, as well as a Michael Jackson song with a full-choir backup.

The only thing that will be missing from this year’s production is the presence of Greg Beck’s and Bruce Nickle’s mothers.

Mary Beck passed away in her home, after a short illness, on Oct. 6, just six days before her 97th birthday.

Trudy Nickle passed away the following day, after a routine trip to Walmart, where she drove herself every day to walk around for exercise. She was 97 years old.

Both Greg Beck and Bruce Nickle have struggled with the transition after their mothers’ abrupt deaths, but music, they say, is their therapy.

“Making music is my stress reliever, and it’s what she would have wanted,” said Beck, who went to band rehearsal the night after his mother passed.

“When I saw Greg go to rehearsal, I could do no less,” said Bruce Nickle, who hasn’t stopped making music since his own mother’s passing.

“If my kids want to dance [at my Celebration of Life service], let them dance,” Mary Beck told her son.

That service will take place at the Family Life Center on Nov. 8, from 2-4 p.m.

A service for Trudy Nickle will be held Oct. 27 at 11 a.m., at Fohn Funeral Home, preceded by a short visitation beginning at 10 a.m.

The Show will go on this weekend, Thursday, October 23, and Saturday, October 25, with performances at 7:30 p.m., and a Sunday, October 26, performance at 2:30 p.m.

This year will mark The Show’s first performance at Cassville High School’s new Performing Arts Center.