I know some forms of dinner theater still exist, for example the murder mystery dinner theater, but I’m thinking more back when famous people, or more realistically, famous people past their primes, would tour dinner theaters around the country. But even past their primes, it was an opportunity to see someone who had been very famous.
Around 1974 we saw Mickey Rooney in one of those, in a divorce comedy called “Three Goats and a Blanket.” I was only 11 and had a rollicking good time, which may have been the level of humor. One reviewer at the time wrote:
Rooney possessed all the energy of a Mack truck in heat. He burst all confines of script and blocking, changed lines, ran circles around befuddled fellow actors and left them gasping for breath. And captivated the audience.
Drama it wasn’t. Vaudeville it was -ribald, raucous and nostalgic, like a bawdy echo of an era when Fields, Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy, Keaton, Sennett and the rest put the gold in the Golden Age of Comedy. It was Rooney’s era too, and he showed us how and why.
We also saw Sal Mineo in “Sunday in New York”, but I didn’t come away with any real impressions of that.
How about you, any memories of that? Anything current that compares in your mind?
I remember going to a dinner theater when I was on a Girl Scout trip in the late 1970s.
The only thing I remember about it was that as we were leaving, there was a long trail of barf that led to a park bench where a father was trying to comfort a very upset and embarrassed daughter who was about our age.
Yes, a number of times.
My folks took me and a few friends to see The Roar of the Greasepaint, the Smell of the Crowd at dinner theater (more like a lunch theater) for my birthday one year. I thought it was great!
I don’t think there are any dinner theaters anywhere near me. There are community theaters that don’t serve food. I saw my brother in law in a production and it was the most remarkable thing I’ve seen. He was a NYU trained actor who never broke through.
The Boulder Dinner Theater just had their last performance very recently. I’m not sure exactly why it closed, but it had been running for 30 years or something.
A few months ago we saw Fiddler there, and previously Little Mermaid, and some other musicals. No big names in shows I’m aware of, but it’s possible it’s happened in the past. It was one of those places where the cast was also the servers, and it sure would have been extra fun to have a semi-retired old movie star collecting the dessert orders at intermission.
The shows were always quite enjoyable, and the acting acceptable to very good. The food however was mid to low tier banquet fare, tasting like much of it was from frozen.
Born in the mid-70s, I’m too young to have experienced any of the “classics” back in the day. I have participated in a few of the “modern” iterations mentioned in the article, group participation murder mysteries with a catered (inexpensively, certainly not steak!) meal. But even that is pretty rare.
I think it’s cost as much as anything else. Local theater tickets run $50 at a bare minimum generally, even with a student / alumni / teacher discount, and anything resembling the better meals of the past I’d assume start at a minimum of $30. So $100 per person (ish) for a few hours sounds rather expensive in the age of “Netflix and Chill.”
Probably the closest modern equivalent is the relatively common and popular movie theaters that have a reasonably full menu and a -very- full drinks menu. The Roadhouse, the Alamo, or what have you. Much less of an event though, and if you eat (and especially drink!) it can get expensive quickly. But dinner and a show lives on in that sense.
I have seen many a show at the now long-defunct West End Dinner Theatre in Alexandria VA in the early to mid 1990s as a friend of mine who lived in that area liked to go there so I’d take her whenever I was visiting (I could afford it, she couldn’t). We were in our twenties and I think we were generally among the younger set there, but it wasn’t as if the clientele was geriatric.
Then in the late 1990s/early 2000s I took my aunt to a dinner theatre in Buckhead Atlanta. I can’t remember the name. The clientele there was definitely on the older side, mostly over 60.
I never saw the attraction of it. Both the food and the entertainment seemed middling at best for the price.
The Chanhassen Minnesota dinner theater is still thriving, although it’s been decades since we’ve been to any shows there. They’re currently doing Jersey Boys, and ended a run of The Music Man recently. I don’t recall personally seeing any famous actors there, but a few have come out of their casts over the years. They claim to be the largest professional dinner theater in the US.
(Chanhassen is now probably more famous as the home of Prince and his newly opened museum/studio.)
Possibly the first date I ever took a girl on was to The Music Hall in Neutral Bay, Sydney. This would have been in the mid-to-late 70s some time; I see it closed in 1980 in fact.
Audience participation was a major feature, and the original poster for its debut production encouraged patrons to: “Hiss the villain, Weep with the Heroine and All join in the choruses.”
The show was a splendidly OTT schlocky Dr Jekyll/Mr Hyde-type thing. My memory tells me it was starring George Sanders as the villain, but I see he died in 1972! It was certainly someone reasonably well-known but I see no online resource to help me with cast lists.
I went to the Stage West dinner theatre in Edmonton at some point in the mid-'80s. I think they advertised themselves as “Where The Stars Come Out To Shine”, but it was more like “Where The Stars Come Out To Die” (e.g. Tom Poston, Jamie Farr). All I remember about that experience was that I got some grapes from the buffet that turned out to be black olives (ick!).
Years later, I was working at a software company and interviewing some summer students and I noticed one of the applicants had worked for several summers at Stage West. I jokingly asked him if he had ever met Jamie Farr and he said he had!
I performed in a dinner-theater production once, many many years ago.
Disliked the experience. Never did it again after that, and since I knew what it was like, I haven’t gone to see that kind of performance myself.
I don’t want to take away from anyone’e enjoyment so I won’t detail why it was unpleasant, but I will say that the other actors who better knew what they were in for didn’t seem to mind the distractions.
I think I went there once. Either that, or Mayfield dinner theatre; both are in Edmonton, and I lived there for a few years. Either way, nobody even remotely well-known was in anything I saw. It was okay, but not outstanding.
I’m willing to give it another chance, though. I do like dinner, and I do like theatre, and it might be fun to try again, if the chance arises.
Sometime in the early 1980s, I took my first girlfriend to see Grease at Toby’s Dinner Theater in Columbia, MD — buffet dinner theater, in the round, waiters were from the cast. The only “name” from the cast was/is Mary Page Keller as Sandy.
Apparently, Toby’s is still kicking ass and taking names after all this time. The city of Columbia built an arts center a few years back and Toby’s moved right in. They are already lining up shows for 2025. Who’da thunk?
My wife and I had season tickets for the Candlelight Theater in Summit IL for several years. It was a dinner theater that did both musicals on an in-the-round stage and plays on a standard stage. Among the shows we saw were Carousel and The Will Rogers Follies.