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Dinner theater (sometimes called dinner and a show) is a form of entertainment that combines a restaurant meal with a staged play or musical. Sometimes the play is incidental entertainment, secondary to the meal, in the style of a sophisticated night club, or the play may be a major production with dinner less important, or in some cases, optional. Dinner theater requires the management of three distinct entities: a live theater, a restaurant, and usually, a bar.

 

The boom seemed to end in the mid-1980s, with many of them closing and most no longer able to afford or attract celebrities, even faded ones, to star in their productions. Aging stars started receiving offers for television and commercial work and they stopped doing dinner theater. Alhambra Dinner Theatre owner Tod Booth commented, "They could make more in a day doing a commercial than they could make during the entire run of dinner theater show, and they didn't have to travel. Plus, a lot of the stars just started dying off. It was a fine gig for a while." Booth went on to say that, in 1999, you could count the number of surviving professional dinner theaters on two hands. There was a stigma attached to dinner theater and audiences got tired of fluff shows such as The Last of the Red Hot Lovers and Arsenic and Old Lace. According to Booth, "A lot of that was crap". In response to criticism and the change in available talent, many theaters started using up-and-coming but relatively unknown actors and began to offer new Broadway shows. They promoted the shows, rather than the stars.