Dinner theatre wows audiences, improv moments highlight show

The Sault’s largest and perhaps most chaotic 'wedding' of the year came to a dynamic end Saturday evening, but the demand for dinner theatre appears to have only just begun.

Algoma Repertory Theatre’s (ART) production of Tony n’ Tina’s Wedding filled the Machine Shop from Wednesday through Saturday this week as hundreds of guests were treated to an action-packed Italian wedding and reception set in Sault Ste. Marie circa 1985.

While the show had a script, the production proudly stood out for its unscripted moments and countless side conversations. Members of the wedding party made an effort to interact with the guests throughout the entire evening, and some even invited attendees to join them on the dancefloor.

Bringing back dinner theatre for the first time since before the pandemic, ART co-director Marc Beaudette was thrilled with how the show went, and he says the performances only got better as the days rolled by.

“It went really well – we were super happy,” he says. “Wednesday was our first night with an audience, and the cast did really great. But they grew it even more and more as the subsequent nights went on, and they got more comfortable speaking with people.”

“The beauty of the show was these little moments the actors created with the patrons themselves that kept things moving.”

Expected to find a balance between sticking with the script while improvising when appropriate, actors remained in character for upwards of four hours, four days in a row.

Calling that a challenge would be an understatement, according to Beaudette.

“A few of them had done murder mysteries before, but they’re nowhere near the scale of this show,” he says. “It’s a very daunting task to ask of them.”

“But every single one of them was brave enough to embrace the process and put themselves on the line in terms of doing something new. Every one of them hit it out of the park.”

The director notes that the show could not have been as successful as it was without all the live music thanks to members of Wyld Stallyns, who acted as the band ‘Fusion’ and provided countless hits from the 80s throughout the night.

“The Wild Stallyns were very dynamic and added so much more than just the music,” Beaudette says. “We put them in some bits, and apart from Christina Speers, who has some acting experience, the others really don’t, and they just jumped in with both feet and did something they’re not used to doing, and they were great.”

Beaudette says the feedback from the community each night was really touching and that guests particularly enjoyed eavesdropping on the conversations between the actors throughout the evening.

“Everybody really enjoyed it,” he says. “When a fight would break out, people would say, ‘oh it really is like a Sault wedding.’ Almost everyone mentioned they didn’t know what to expect."

“We did have one woman reach out who said they had seen the show in Toronto, and she thought the cast here was 10 times better.”

The director also gave props to the venue for doing their part.

“The Machine shop was fantastic,” he says. “The food was dynamite, and the service staff fit right into the show without detracting from anything. The look of that room was just amazing.”

Beaudette sees an opportunity to build off the momentum of the show and says he and his co-director Kara Colynuck will consider more dinner theatre productions in the future.

“I definitely think we would remount this,” he says. “It’s a pretty intricate show, and it’s tough, but now that we’ve done it once, it gets easier.”

“What I’d like to see us be able to do is maybe find a space that we could do during tour train season or the boating season every Friday and Saturday night and get tourists to come to see it.”