Neil Simon for Supper

Some years ago, store owners discovered the lure of one-stop shopping. Today showmen are making the same discovery. In a converted pancake house in San Diego, a former laundry in Kansas City, a onetime illegal gambling casino in New Orleans and countless other locations, they are drawing packed houses to dinner theaters. The basic formula: offer cocktails, dinner and a play under one roof, all (except for the liquor) at a fixed price, which varies from a weeknight low of $6 in some Southern towns to a weekend high of $15 in areas close to Boston and New York City. Says Mrs. Russ Carll of New Orleans: "It's the biggest bargain in town."

Two years ago, there were 20 Equity-associated dinner theaters in the U.S. Now there are 80, plus more than 100 houses employing non-union actors. (At non-Equity theaters, the performers often earn only tips by doubling as waiters and waitresses; the nuns' chorus from The Sound of Music, for example, may serve drinks at intermission.) For owners, the Hayloft in Manassas, Va., grosses $1.5 million a year, and the Firehouse in Omaha takes in $16,000 weekly--$9,000 of which is profit. Says Actors' Equity President Theodore Bikel: "Dinner theaters are the only success story in the theater today."

The basic idea of eat, drink and be amused, all at the same time, can be traced--if anyone insists--to metropolitan sophisticates of the Roman Empire. In the U.S. today, dinner theater is largely a suburban phenomenon. It began to catch on in the late '50s in the South and Midwest, but the real boom began in the late '60s with the decline of the inner cities and the rising fear of crime. In the Washington, D.C., area, notes Actor Walt Lachman, a dozen suburban restaurant-theaters sprang up after the riots of 1968. "The white middle-class dollar was not coming downtown after that," says Lachman, "and the theater needs that suburban dollar to survive."

The seating capacity of a dinner theater can vary from 200 to 800, and the atmosphere ranges from the cozy rusticity of the Coachlight in Warehouse Point, Conn., to the early Las Vegas eleganza of the neighboring Chateau de Ville. But with few exceptions there are four constants: 1) a huge parking lot; 2) expensive drinks; 3) an enormous meal at tables crammed to fire department limits around a stage often no bigger than the platter under the ubiquitous roast beef; and 4) light comedy or musicals after dinner interrupted by lengthy intermissions during which patrons can refill those expensive drinks.

The cuisine, usually served buffet style, runs to the bland and hearty: beef, chicken, salads, garden-variety vegetables and one or two trifling desserts. Although chefs are not touted on the marquee, the quality of the food, say theater owners, is crucial. "You could do a staggering production of Showboat," says Play Packager John Bowab, "but if there is a guy sitting there for two hours wishing he had an Alka-Seltzer, you're dead."

The plays, too, must be easily digestible. "Drama of any consequence is out," notes one Washington critic. "People would prefer not to see Oedipus gouge his eyes out in the very arena in which they have just polished off a cherry tart." Staples of the dt. circuit are Forty Carats, Never Too Late, South Pacific and, of course, the entire oeuvre of Neil Simon. So far, one neglected playwright seems to be Ferenc Molnar--a pity because his work is full of succulent eating scenes.

At the Equity theaters, old film stars and off-season television celebrities--Joan Fontaine, Tab Hunter, Jane Russell, Dorothy Lamour--earn $2,000-$3,000 a week. The dinner-theater superstar, at $5,000 a week, is Van Johnson, who works 50 weeks a year. Says TV's Vivian Vance, currently starring at Connecticut's Coachlight: "For younger actors, it's the only work there is. For me--well, any time I want a new tile floor or some new draperies, I just do six weeks at a dinner theater." Audiences, who tend to spruce up for their night out in flashy sports coats and long dresses, are almost uniformly middleaged, middle-income and middleclass. Many have never seen live theater before. Yet many dinner-theatergoers return every time the play changes, generally every four to six weeks. "We are creating a new theater audience," says Charles Wisdom, owner of the New Orleans Beverly, though so far it is mainly an audience for froth. It will be a few years, at least, before Hamlet can muse that the meal's the thing to catch the conscience of the king.

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