ABSTRACT
Dinner theatre, broadly defined, is a performance practice that conveniently combines two elements of an evening out: dinner and a show. A late twentieth-century phenomenon, dinner theatre is known for light entertainment: revivals of old standards such as Arsenic and Old Lace, musicals like Sister Act, and its own dinner-themed farces, including Cookin’ with Gus (a play that was famously written in a week, and whose tagline is “A recipe for laughter”). Given this, it seems far removed from so-called serious theatre, and certainly from high modernism and the avant-gardes of the early twentieth century. Susan Bennett (2008) notes that “the ongoing lack of scholarly interest in the genre of dinner theatre suggests a kind of contempt for this popular medium”, but few critics have taken up her call for scholarship that sees the world of theatre through “a different, revisionist and inclusive lens that allows a place for dinner theatre” (ibid., 7–8). Part of the problem is that dinner theatre asks to be taken seriously, and its sincerity is not of the kind that whets critics’ appetites; rather than striving to change the art of theatre itself, it strives – or at least seems to strive – simply to entertain. Yet this account of dinner theatre is an impoverished one, as paying serious attention to this performance practice reveals. Thinking beyond the idea that “the main attraction for dinner theatre has always been the low ticket price” (Lynk 1993, 2), as William Lynk claims in the only book devoted to the topic, a history-cum-business manual entitled simply Dinner Theatre, this chapter situates dinner theatre within a twentieth-century history of dinner theatricality, as a performance practice that illuminates and interrogates the relationship between theatre and the theatricality of dinner itself.
