Dinner Theater

Sunday, October 5th we had our first dinner show here at the ODB entitled 'A Little Dinner Music.' A local community theater group, Kaleidoscope, presented an evening of song and food preformed by the New Vision Singers. This is a group Marshall and I sing with on Monday nights, so, as you can imagine, we were quite busy that evening. Between the two of us, we handled the bartending which was much more than we anticipated. We had a FULL HOUSE (actually a little over full due to a few unscheduled guests) with 64 attendees. The audience was composed of about 70% family and friends, so they made for an easy sell. Response was great with the audience laughing and clapping spontaneously throughout the evening.

The format of the event was that of singing waiters. The nine of us who were performing also served the entire meal. Each course was followed by a 5-7 minute set of songs. For those of you who don't know, the restaurant industry is overly populated with artists of all kinds. It's very hard too earn a living in the art world, so artist often fall into the restaurant industry just looking for enough money to pay the bills while they are pursuing their real career. Anyway . . . we were blessed with some very handy performers who also knew their way around the kitchen. The entire evening was a success from everyone's standpoint - the audience, the performers, Lu the Director, and we at the restaurant. Multiple individuals requested we do this again, maybe even do it once a month!

Marshall and I each had a little solo in the big pop medley with me singing a blurb from 'Let's get physical' (yeah, I know) and Marshall singing a bit of 'Spinning Wheel.' At one point the entire cast formed a kick line for a section of the old favorite 'This is it.' Boy did we get a huge response from the audience on that one! Most songs were accompanied by 'planned movement' (not dance) so there was a lot for the audience to take in.


Our kids, Shane and Harmony were in attendance sitting with our parents in the back. The kids have been to all of our rehearsals and knew the songs almost as well as we did. We'd hear them spontaneously break out into to one of the songs in the car or at the dinner table. Makes you wonder what they're singing at school! 'Let's get Physical' does come across quite the same from a three-year-old's mouth. My Mother-in-law tells me that Shane was telling her what was coming up next during the performance and both were often singing along with us.


Practices continue as we're work towards a full-length concert on December 6th. Plans are in the works for future Dinner Shows at the ODB, so stay tuned!