ELLY GRIMM

   • Leader & Times

Those looking for some great live theater will soon have just that thanks to Community Concerts of Liberal.

Erinn Dearth and Dan Beckmann will be bringing “It Takes Two – A Legendary Duo Revue” to Liberal Sunday, Oct. 25, with the show taking place at 3 p.m. in Maskus Auditorium at Liberal High School. The show will celebrate many famous historical duos, and the pair said bringing the show together was rather a long journey.

“We've both been performing our whole lives, and Erinn started in the official capacity before I did. I was a class clown, if that counts, and that started when I was around 2 years old or so,” Beckmann said with a chuckle. “We both were in theater growing up our whole lives. And speaking for myself, I ended up going to college to study acting, and then worked in Minneapolis and New York City and cruise ships and all over the country and things like that.”

“And I grew up in community theater. I'd been doing theater my whole life, and I moved around and did some work on cruise ships and stuff. And when I moved back to North Carolina, I really wanted to start producing some of my own shows,” Dearth said. “So I produced a show called “Letters From Home,” and that ran for several years with another girl. Then I was looking for a guy to hire, and I hired Dan. We met in the Minneapolis airport, and we were best friends by the time we reached cruising altitude, and then we eventually got married.”

Being a tight duo themselves, the pair agreed, helped inspire the idea for the show.

“Originally we were thinking ‘We should do the musical duos everyone has heard of’ and all that,” Beckmann said. “But then, as we started developing the show, and since we've always worked as a as a twosome and self-produced our shows and done all the avenues of creativity together as a two-person thing, we thought that was something we should focus on, that power two people can have that brings out.”

“The show features really any duo you can think of. It started because when we do our other show, we do a lot of costume changes, and we have this format where one of us does a solo, the other one goes off stage, changes costumes, comes back in the new costume and vice versa,” Dearth said. “But since we were doing a two-person show, we had to kind of crack the code on how do we do all these duets if we're only doing do we change costumes? So we came up with this idea of traveling with a projector and a screen and pre-recording a bunch of sketch comedy homages, and that allowed us to also not just honor the musical duos but also the pop culture icons and the history icons, and almost anything you can think of, and that's what makes this show so fun.”

The “Letters From Home” visited Liberal a few years ago, and Dearth and Beckmann said they are excited to be returning to Liberal.

“We've been in Liberal before with ‘Letters From Home,’ and this one is so different from that. I know a lot of the folks who came to see that one will also come to see this one, and in our experience in the last month performing for a lot of groups that we've performed for before, it's really fun to interact with the audience in a completely different way because this show is a lot more comedy-forward,” Dearth said. “This show is still touching in a lot of ways, but it's just a very different experience. It's very ongoing, it's fast, and it's snappy. I think my favorite part of coming back to cities where we've performed before is people's reaction at how different the show is and the laughter they have.”

“I think it's fun to return with a with a product that's entirely different than the one they saw before, because if they're coming back in the first place, they probably enjoyed what they saw in the first show,” Beckmann added. “But again, we’re also kind of subverting expectations with something that's completely different, which has been really fun throughout this tour. I also just like the Great Plains area, I grew up coming to Kansas and my grandparents lived in Hays, so it's always nice to come back to the Midwest in general because it feels a little bit like coming home.”

The pair agreed the audience should ultimately have a great time at the show.

“I feel like this show has something for everyone. There are so many different duos we pay tribute to from so many different genres, but there's literally something everyone is going to latch onto in this show,” Dearth said. “You might not recognize every single duo we pay homage to, but there's definitely going to be some that are for you.”

“The structure of the show is very unique to live performance, and so I would second what Erinn says. What’s kind of surprised me is we've had a lot of kids come to the show, and the kids leave talking about the parts that appealed to them that happen to be different than the aspects that appeal to their parents,” Beckmann added. “All of the shows we do, we try to make them for a broad audience and appeal to everybody. This show is really unique in how I feel like no matter where you come from or who you are, what age you are, there's going to be something that connects with you or that makes you laugh that you’ll remember from the show.”

Beckmann and Dearth agreed it is great to be able to appeal to multiple generations.

“It's great. It's not an easy thing to do in 2026, because you've got the concert-goers who are often older and are very used to coming to live theater events and gathering community around those live performances,” Beckmann said. “The Gen Z and Gen Alpha youngsters grew up in a very different time of technology and the way we consume media basically on demand, so it's increasingly difficult to unify people under a single banner with live performance. That's something everyone's trying to crack, and I don't think ever it's very difficult to do, but I like the little piece of success we found in being able to appeal to such a wide range of people under a single route in 2026.”

“One of my favorite memories from this tour so far: we had a very intergenerational audience that include very small children in the front and some very old people who came in with walkers and were very seasoned and had been coming to the concerts for years, and everyone was laughing together,” Dearth added. “The crew could literally hear from backstage the different ages in the laughter like the giggles of the tiny children and the har-hars from the older generation, and it was so magical to hear everyone laughing under one roof together from so many different generations. I think that that's the thing that like warms my heart the most.”

Overall, the duo agreed, it should be a successful show.

“I am a tough critic when it comes to what I want to see in my live shows, and this show was definitely conjured from a place of what would I want to see in 2026 when you have so many options of what to do with your free time and so many iterations of what to view for entertainment,” Beckmann said. “If you're on the fence about coming out because you're not a big fan of live entertainment or you've been bored in the past, I can promise you you're not going to be bored at this show.”

“I would add the show is family friendly, which is great because it seems like there are very few activities families can do together where everyone can get something out of it,” Dearth added. “So bring the entire family out and enjoy something together because that's a rare thing.”