Join us for the first blog of the new season for Matthew Richter/xom Dinner Theater. Leave a comment and give us your thoughts on the show or rate the existing reviews to register your opinion.

I’m not going to say that Matt Richter is a genius but, well, there you go, I said it.
Dinner theater. Boy does it bring to mind bad performances of ‘Godspell’ and anemic meals of fettuccine alfredo and iceberg lettuce. There is nothing in this evening that even faintly resembles dinner theater as we know it. Nothing.
Welcome to the new world.
You enter the darkened theater. You are asked to stand in front of the first row of seats. More people file in. They stand in front of you. There is a black curtain blocking the stage. You don’t know if you should sit or not. Some people do. It is confusing. You are thrown off guard. It’s not how we usually start a show. You get separated from your friends. You find them again. Good. I love this feeling.
A mike’d voice speaks in the darkness. He comes down the stairs from the back of the seats. He looks like a futuristic throwback to the Wild West. He is the overly passionate and loquacious Director of the Board of the Foundation and he will continue throughout the evening to try and rein himself in. Finally we know that we are that Board and that we are here for this very important meeting of the board and so it begins.
Matt Richter is mesmerizing. He takes you through this fictictionalized history of food as he traps you in his charismatic web. He seduces you. He intrigues you. He beguiles you. You wait to know what he will say next. You want to date him.
Jody-Paul Wooster is his assistant and the perfect foil, slightly awkward, brilliantly subtle as they build this tension of ??? rivalry? keeping a secret? what is it?
Don’t think for a second that you will be allowed to passively watch this ’show’ as you eat your meal. Every course of Chef Lisa Esposito’s exquisite meal is an interactive dance with Richter, Wooster, the members of the Board and the text. Actually, I don’t even know if I can call it a ‘meal’ it’s really more of a journey.
There is a course presented as a poem, a ritual involving chocolate and sparkling wine, another course that is literally a translation of a corinthian column(i’m not telling you more, you have to go), a story about a nitrous balloon and a watermelon and a thing about a dinner roll… and that’s all in the first act.
In the end this surprisingly poetic script leads us chew on this thought: ‘if immortality requires infinite repetition, what is the future of food as art?’
Don’t be surprised if you hear about this show moving to Chicago or New York, it’s that tasty; you will be happy that you got to there when the recipe was conceived.

Jon Milazzo: Owner/Partner of Retrofit Home on Capitol Hill, is a shopgirl with a couple of degrees in theatre among other things.

From the opening invitation sung by Sarah Rudinoff to the closing Secret Cream Puffs, this show is full of surprises. Diners play the Board of Directors of a fictional futuristic “Foundation” that commissioned Richter’s elders to investigate the simple question “how do we save food?”
Seventy-three years later, it is Richter’s role as Director of the Commission, and his assistant played by Jodi-Paul Wooster, to deliver the answer in 16 servings of invention, creation, history and culinary tomfoolery.

Like an edible inconvenient truth, “Dinner Theater” explores how near to extinction real food has become. Facing fast food’s “immortality gained through repetition”, the show asks what is lost if scientists can replace the caprese salad with a genetically modified tomato growing on the vine with basil and mozzarella already inside it? It may taste good, but the increased risk brought by simplified food diversity may not be worth it. Put another way, if there’s only one strain of apple left in the world, what happens when fruit bats begin competing with us to eat them?

There are a few fear-factor moments for the audience. Volunteers for Il Terrore, Il Conclusione d’Amore, Blindfolded Caprese, and Vaginadinnerroll didn’t know what to expect. But who other than Richter, sporting ‘friendly muttonchops’ and a tuxedo, could compel you in all seriousness to join him in performing the “Nitrous Caper”?

When your show opens with a genius, travels 20,000 years through the history of food and art, posits an Incan recipe language, includes paella for 40, and sends you home with a box of “Safety Leisure Cupcakes”, you’ve got a recipe for fresh, entertaining multi-layered fun. “Dinner Theater”
celebrates so much in two hours the after-taste of the experience lingers for days.

Kudos to OTB for offering XOM and Richter the platform for premiering this piece. This diner was particularly pleased to see this first collaboration between OTB and Richter, Wooster, and Shawn Belyea, (the creative team behind 14/48, “the world’s quickest theater festival”). A second helping couldn’t come too soon.

And while all four sittings of “Dinner Theater” at OTB are sold out, just call up XOM and order in. They’ll serve it up “Dinner Theater” hot for you and 39 friends on your stage too.

Alex M. Dunne has seen almost every show at On the Boards since 2002, and enjoys pop-rocks with a nice glass of Las Rochas.

Dinner Theater is another provocative and risky idea by Matthew Richter that promises to get people talking and thinking, and that’s why I love it. The intimacy of the evening and well-crafted presentation makes me feel like I just went through a rite of passage and now I am part of a secret club. I don’t want to comment too specifically on the food and accompanying narrative because that would spoil the fun. But I will say, “yum!”, “pretty!” and “poprocks rule!”. Put them in your wine and hold the glass to your ear and listen for a while, then guzzle it down—fun times people.

I won’t lie though, there are bugs to work out. Most notably, the pace. It is too fast, please slow it down. Each bite needs to be savored longer, thought about deeper and experienced on its own before being interrupted by the next storyline.

Yoko Ott recently started working in the education department at the Frye Art Museum after being the visual arts curator for Bumbershoot for the past five years. Her favorite superhero is Kikaida and she likes dogs, not cats.

I don’t like the name OtB Dispatch much but it’s our feeble attempt at a staff blog, which is really just a cover-up strategy for the fact that I was terrible about updating my own blog. At a minimum, we’re promising weekly posts by our staff and we hope readers will check back often to make sure we’re staying on top of it.

Anyway, we’re psyched about the utility of our new website. Not only do we have more control over our blogs but there are also more interactive features that make the blogging experience so much better. We also have a lot more potential with the streaming audio and video which means you can get a glimpse of upcoming shows and listen to interviews with artists on our season. We’re still in beta-mode with the site so please let us know if you see any glaring errors or room for improvement.

Click Here to read the blog archive of performances from May 2004 – June 2006