James Oseland: Dinner Theater, U.S.A.

DINNER THEATER, U.S.A.

A reporter journeys into the heartland and discovers that there’s a whole lot more than prime rib at the end of the rainbow

By James Oseland

From American Theatre, April 1998

I am sitting third-row center in the Chanhassen Dinner Theater in suburban Minneapolis chewing tough prime rib and stewing in my own juices. A production of State Fair is about to start, a hit for the venerable theater, I have been told. But my expectation is that it will be awful—that is, until I stop chewing and look around.

In spite of snow-slicked roads and the fact that it is 9 o’clock in a part of the country where bedtime usually means 10, the house is sold out and hums with anxious anticipation. At the banquette to my right Don and Dolores of Brainerd, Minnesota, a sprightly couple celebrating their 54th wedding anniversary dressed in matching Speed Racer-striped jogging suits. To my left, a group of chattering teenage farm girls—a Christian girls club from Nowheresville, South Dakota—who have taken the church bus in for a night of big-city entertainment.

“I heard the record of State Fair before,” one says to the other. “It was so good.”

“I’ve never heard it. I’ve never been to a play before,” her friend responds.

Soon, the show, with its blustery score and misty-eyed take on the heartland, begins. Before I can catch my breath, I am being swept away by one of the most magical theater experiences I have had in years. The production isn’t merely good, it’s divine, with a fresh, giddy power that whips me around like a kite in a tornado. And I don’t even like musicals. I glance at the South Dakota girls. They sit frozen it that hypnotized, chest-forward posture that a really good theater experience contorts you into; the girl who revealed she was a theater virgin has tears streaming down her cheeks. Is this dinner theater?

The images in my stock of preconceptions were vivid. A sadly inept production of Send Me No Flowers starring some sitcom has-been and a meal of soggy breaded shrimp were what I expected of dinner theater, and not without good reason. In the 1970s, the genre’s glory decade, fly-by-night dinner theaters sprouted in strip malls from Tallahassee to Sacramento with alarming frequency, most closing up shop soon after they’d opened. The form was regarded as the junk food of the American theatrical diet, with productions that exhibited little skill and even less artistry. Dinner theaters and the productions they staged were the theatrical counterpart of true-crime paperbacks and straight-to-cable soft-core porn movies.

But while it’s easy to be cynical about the genre, for countless Americans dinner theater is the only kind of theater they know or will ever know. In 1998 there are only one third as many dinner theaters in operation as there were 20 years ago, but they still flourish in regional pockets all across America. All its homespun tackiness aside, to ignore the form is to ignore a substantial force in contemporary American theater. Though some of us may wish it weren’t so, the average spunky dinner theater musical, with its Home Shopping Channel brand of charm—not to mention the considerable merits of a hot meal, a free-flowing bar, and ample free parking—has more relevance to most Americans’ lives and aesthetics, dreams and desires than any Robert Wilson production or Tony Kushner play ever will.

Once, not all that long ago, dinner theater was the only kind of theater I knew. My first encounter with live theater, in fact, was at a suburban Chicago dinner theater. It was the summer of 1975. I was a skinny suburban 12-year-old with a thyroid condition. My family had just moved to the area, into a just-built tract home that still smelled of bathroom caulking. My dad was mostly missing in action in those days, but one afternoon he showed up with tickets to the local dinner theater, the Arlington Park. The production we went to that night was a revival of Arsenic and Old Lace, starring John Carradine and Zsa Zsa and Eva Gabor. In retrospect it was terrible—Zsa Zsa went up on every other line and Eva performed as though she’d just dropped three hits of acid—but I have better recall of this show than the hundreds of other evenings at the theater I’ve had since. It was raw, expressive theater that shook me to the core.

So now I am driving across the heartland in search of the theater of my childhood, trying to figure out why the Gabor sisters won’t leave my consciousness, trying to figure out, 23 years after my first encounter with it, what makes this peculiarly American folk-art form tick. My first stop is Akron, Ohio, the kind of midsize postindustrial city where every road seems to lead to a WalMart.

Dinner theater is big business in Akron. The Carousel Dinner Theater, in operation since 1973 and one of the country’s oldest and largest, is the city’s crowning cultural jewel (“It’s Ohio’s premiere entertainment choice!” touts the city’s visitor’s guide). The theater itself, which seats over 1,000 patrons, occupies an immense building that resembles a Greyhound bus station more than a theater—a not inappropriate fact considering that the Carousel buses in more than 2,000 motorcoach tour groups every year.

“I don’t want to say dinner theaters get a bad rap—maybe it was because we used to do buffet. But back in the 70s, most dinner theaters really did have this kind of awful barn atmosphere,” says Prescott Griffith, artistic director of the Carousel since 1978 and president of the American Dinner Theater Institute, a service organization that functions as a liaison for the nation’s Equity-contracted dinner theaters. Griffith is friendly man in his fifties who has witnessed the vicissitudes of the business first hand, from the era when dinner theaters were the reigning populist theatrical form and sitcom stars ruled their stages.

“In the 1970s audiences didn’t care about seeing Barefoot in the Park—they cared about seeing George Hamilton in Barefoot in the Park,” Griffith says. “And boy did we have some big stars then: Artie Johnson, Joseph Cotton, Bob Cummings, Dorothy Lamour—if they’d been a success on TV, they’d come to the Carousel.” But by the 80s there was a shift. Stars began demanding higher salaries—salaries that most dinner theater producers couldn’t afford. “I guess I really don’t miss the time when we did star show—it got to be more trouble than it was worth,” says Griffith.

He looks at me and smiles. “I don’t know if I should tell you this story, but Martha Raye was one of the last stars that we used. She was in our production of Everybody Loves Opal shortly before she died. One day, an hour before the performance, she called to tell us she had a chest cold and couldn’t go on. Well, we talked her into it, but during the second scene she suddenly stood up and walked offstage. As luck would have it, there was a doctor in the house. He examined her backstage and quickly deduced what the problem really was. She didn’t have a chest cold—she had two broken ribs. The night before she had apparently drank a whole bottle of Smirnoff—or something equally potent—and taken a horrible, horrible fall.”

That night I attend the Carousel’s current offering, the Gershwin song cycle Crazy for You. It’s a well-intentioned effort that fails to fly, with a clumsy-looking set that seems destined to crash to the floor. The evening boasts many dinner theater hallmarks: an energetic cast, an appreciative audience, and waiters who crank out homilies like “I was debating whether or not to give you the prime rib or keep it for myself—it sure looks yummy.” I bolt for the nearest exit at the first intermission.

Later, I dream I am standing in front of the theater where I saw Arsenic and Old Lace. The building no longer exists: it is a gaping, smoking hole in the ground, as if the theater has sunken into Hell. I peer into it and am overcome by fumes. I wake up gagging.

“I love my job. I even love it when I get irate phone calls from audience members. It makes things much more interesting,” says 37-year-old Gary Griffin, the artistic director of one of suburban Chicago’s most successful dinner theaters, the Drury Lane Oakbrook. I am talking to him in the theater’s splendidly gold-swathed lobby. I feel as though I’ve been transported to the Liberace Museum.

Dinner theater’s roots run deep in the Chicago area. William Pullinsi founded the world’s first dinner theater here, in 1952. He later went on to open the Candlelight Dinner Theater, a dinner theater stalwart that operated from 1959 until its demise last year. Thanks in equal measure to Pullinsi’s skills as an entrepreneur (“Chicken dinner and a Broadway show for $3.95!” was one of his more famous advertising slogans) and as a director, dinner theater is a staple of Chicago’s theatrical diet. Even today there are four professional dinner theaters in the area. They boast an approximate combined annual membership of over 120,000 patrons.

“The Drury Lane is the only theater I’ve ever worked at where I haven’t had to worry about money,” Griffin says in a pleasing Midwestern drawl. “But a big part of my job is trying to figure out ways to bring in new audiences. Our current one is going to die off.”

But such an undertaking is a delicate affair in the world of American dinner theaters. “Audiences want to see what they’re used to seeing,” Griffin says. “And right now that’s Broadway musicals.” Griffin has discovered in his tenure that musicals are the most surefire ticket-sellers. Indeed, last year’s Drury Lane season consisted exclusively of musicals: Run for Your Wife, Follies, Hello, Dolly!, George M!, and South Pacific.

“Before coming to the Drury Lane I hadn’t done too many musicals. I slowly became fascinated with the form,” says Griffin. “But as a director I’ve found that you can get away with a lot if your take care of your audience right up front—you know, let them know that they’re not going to be assaulted by your production.”

But Griffin has discovered that even the best-laid plans get thrown the occasional curveball. “When we staged A Chorus Line a few years back, we cleaned up some of the play’s racier language,” he explains. “But audiences thought that somehow we’d made the show raunchier. Somehow seeing it our theater made it seem like they were seeing it at their church.”

A few hours later I am on I-88 driving out of town. It’s a chaste midwinter landscape of dried-up corn fileds and tract-home developments. “You can get off that weight-loss merry-go-round once and for all,” my AM radio shouts at me. I pull into the Country Crock, a roadside diner. I am deciding whether to play it safe and order a grilled cheese sandwich or dare the lasagna when Joanne, my waitress, notices the Drury Lane programs that I have splayed in front of me.

“Oh, I love the Drury Lane! My sister and mom and me buy each other tickets to every show—that’s our little present to each other. Did you see South Pacific? We saw it last week. It just about killed me,” she says. “I haven’t missed one single show there for the last 12 years.”

I am backstage at the Chanhassen’s production of State Fair. Don and Dolores have polished off their last Tom Collins for the night and, I’m guessing, begun their drive home. I start talking to one of the show’s lead performers, David Brinkley. He’s a handsome man in lumberjack plaid. I tell him about the South Dakota girls who’d been sitting next to me, that this evening had been their first experience of live theater. “I get people coming up to me all the time after shows telling me that this was their first time ever at the theater,” he says. “They’re almost scared to talk to you, like you’re a figure who’s just walked off a movie screen or something. Did that happen when I was doing theater in New York when I was younger? I don’t think so.”

Michael Brindisi, the director of State Fair as well as the Chanhassen’s artistic director, offers to take me on a tour of the theater’s 91,000-sqaure-foot facility. Originally from Philadelphia, he speaks with the fast-talking fervor of a preacher. We walk through a rabbit’s warren of performing spaces, rehearsal rooms, and costume-storage vaults. “We really had to play hardball with the Rodgers and Hammerstein people when we were trying to secure the rights for State Fair,” he tells me. “I think the main reason they gave them to me was because I promised to run the show for eight months. They had just overseen that not-so-great Broadway revival of the show and I think we blew them away with our production. John Davidson [a producer of the Broadway revival, as well as one of its stars] came twice to see it and just kept shaking his head and saying, ‘How did you do such a great job? How did you do it?’ It was easy—the key was listening to what State Fair is really about. It’s about hearing your heart.”

Our tour of the theater ends in a smoky rehearsal hall, still active with a group of dancers rehearsing for an upcoming show even well after midnight. “Most dinner theater audiences are coming to celebrate something—a birthday, and anniversary,” Brindisi says as we watch the dancers go about their moves. “So the lesson I’ve learned is simple: Don’t fuck up your audiences’ evening. Make them have a good time.” He pauses for a moment. “You know, there’s a reviewer in town who won’t come to see any of our shows. He says, ‘Ugh, that’s a dinner theater.’ But I love the opportunity to turn people around.”

A week later I have left Minnesota and I am turned around. It is 9 degrees Fahrenheit and I am sitting in northern Ontario on the shore of Lake Huron. I am driving back home, to New York, but have decided to take the most northern route I can take, and I’ve decided to take it slow. I am leafing through the artifacts of my trip across America: grease-stained programs and a photograph I just developed of the house where we lived in suburban Chicago.

Am I imagining it, or has dinner theater cleaned up its act? I ventured into the dark heart of America expecting to revisit Zsa Zsa and Eva fumbling around. But the only tried-and-true dinner theater cliché I encountered has been the unappetizing food. If dishes like peppered bacon-wrapped pork loin and salmon crowns never pass my lips again it’ll be too soon.

With a series of slow, crisp strokes, I rip the photograph of my childhood home into more pieces than I can count. I look out to the horizon. If I squint hard enough I think I can make out America on the other side of the lake. Or am I dreaming again?