Orange County Dinner Theater Business Booms
The Japanese tourist grabbed Miss Annie’s blue garter by his teeth and yanked as she carefully delivered instructions in a mix of English and Japanese. Giggles rippled through the audience, followed by hoots and applause, as the bemused tourist claimed his elastic prize and returned to his seat.
On a recent weekday night, more than 800 diners crammed Wild Bill’s Wild West Dinner Extravaganza in Buena Park. They munched on pork ribs and fried chicken, watched can-can dancers, gasped at the feats of a knife thrower and joined in sing-a-longs to vintage American tunes like “Home on the Range.”
On nearby Beach Boulevard, another 1,000 locals and tourists feasted on Cornish game hens without the aid of forks or knives and cheered jousting knights at the Medieval Times Dinner & Tournament show.
Despite the sluggish economy, both dinner theaters are doing a brisk business, even withticket prices that can top $100 for a family of four. The market: tourists looking for an evening attraction and local families looking for wholesome live entertainment.
“There’s really no place to go in the evening with your kids for entertainment,” said Ed Beaver, vice president of L.A. Entertains, which operates Wild Bill’s. It is a subsidiary of the London-based entertainment company, the Rank Organization.
Playing to full houses since opening last April in a building converted from a bowling alley at a cost of $6 million, Wild Bill’s has been so successful that L.A. Entertains plans to build an Old England-themed dinner theater next year in Anaheim. Beaver said the company is also exploring the possibility of another dinner theater near Universal Studios Hollywood, in addition to the three dinner theaters it operates near Orlando, Fla.
Opened five years ago as part of a small chain of dinner theaters, Medieval Times in Buena Park hosts about 700,000 guests, 200,000 more than a sister restaurant near Orlando. Medieval Times, owned by a consortium of Spanish investors who founded the first restaurant in Spain about two years ago, also operates dinner theaters in Schaumburg, Ill., near Chicago; and Lyndhurst, N.J., near New York City. Construction is about to start on another in Dallas. There are also two Medieval Times theaters in Spain.
“Our business is staying consistent and, especially this summer, we are doing quite well,” said Joyia Emard, director of marketing at Medieval Times in Buena Park.
Though both have depended on local residents to see them through this year’s tourism slump, both Wild Bill’s and Medieval Times actively court the tourist market. At times, that has meant going to extraordinary lengths.
Recently, for example, Beaver and three other Wild Bill’s workers spent an afternoon combing Disneyland looking for two dozen Turkish visitors to notify them of the correct starting time for the evening’s show. In making a routine call to confirm the visitors’ reservations, a Wild Bill’s marketing official discovered that the group had mistaken the starting time and would be arriving an hour late.
Although they couldn’t be found at Disneyland, Wild Bill’s staff made special arrangements to have their table and meals ready anyway. “It’s one of those things you just do. We’re in the service business,” Beaver said.
The show’s fast-paced Wild West theme especially delights the Japanese, many of whom are fascinated with Western lore. They often join in the hooting and hollering going on around them.
And it doesn’t hurt that Shelly Morgan Nichols, one of the singer-dancers who plays co-star Miss Annie, learned enough Japanese as a performer at Tokyo Disneyland to coax Japanese visitors like Taro-san into the audience-participation skits.
Guests are initiated into the Old West atmosphere--Hollywood-style--the moment they enter the theater. Each is issued a straw cowboy hat and encouraged to belly up to the bar, if not the souvenir counter. A few minutes later, the doors open into a cavernous dining hall festooned with flags and Western memorabilia and smelling strongly of fried chicken.
The program starts immediately and continues at such a frenetic pace that one guest, retiree Linus Unser of Simi Valley, complained after a recent show that he hadn’t had enough time to finish his meal. Miss Annie and a youthful-looking Wild Bill announce the arrival of each new dinner course as waiters come running from the kitchen.
A few of the men in the audience are picked to join the dancing girls in a square dance. Miss Annie paces the crowd singing of her desire to find a “real man” to remove her garter. And perhaps the bravest guest of all is the one who volunteers to prop a balloon between his or her knees as a target for the knife thrower.
On a recent night, that honor went to Australian pilot Clayton Simmons, who emerged unscathed. “It was just nonstop action,” he said, expressing how much he enjoyed the show. “There wasn’t a pause.”