Cascabel by Rick Bayless, Tony Hernandez, and Heidi Stillman (review)

Bringing together food and theatre is not a recent phenomenon. In the United States, a somewhat potted history dates to at least 1953 with the founding of Virginia's Barksdale Theatre, allegedly America's first dinner theatre. Throughout the 1980s and '90s, the open kitchen, which treated the choreography of a working kitchen itself as performance, led to a very different sort of dinner theatre. Today, the relationship between these two forms of entertainment is more pronounced than ever. On the one side, top restaurants consider the theatricality of everything they do. For instance, New York City's three-Michelin-starred Eleven Madison Park announced a radical overhaul for autumn 2012, "treating diners to flashes of Broadway dazzle: card tricks, a glass dome full of smoke, a blast of sea mist from a tabletop clambake and a cheese course that emerges from a picnic basket placed on the table" (New York Times, 27 July 2012). On the other, restaurants and bars are crucial within theatres; in New York alone, recent Public Theater renovations have focused on food and drink, while Lincoln Center has brought in celebrity chefs Marcus Samuelsson and Tom Colicchio to head up renewed dining options.

At a moment when the theatricality of cooking has become central within Western cultures, much of the focus, especially through the rise in popularity of the televised cooking show, is on the "showing doing" of culinary preparation and presentation. Chefs' names are arguably more recognizable across class boundaries than ever before, appearing as "celebrities" alongside actors, musicians, and athletes. A recent performance at Chicago's Lookingglass Theatre, Cascabel, sought to imagine a new mode of dinner theatre, one of the first theatrical performances to seriously embody these recent developments. Bringing noted Chicago chef Rick Bayless, the star of PBS's Mexico: One Plate at a Time, into the live theatrical space to literally bring together food and theatre, Lookingglass sought not only to capitalize on the popularity of celebrity chefs, but potentially to imagine a new form of theatre that engages with a multitude of sensual pleasures. Like the cinematic "scratch and sniff" of Odorama or the 1970s "Sensurround," the audience here was not only teased by the temptation of onstage cooking and its concomitant aromas, but the performance attempted to deliver culinary, as well as artistic, satisfaction. The performance framed Bayless's exquisite Mexican cooking within a theatrical narrative, and while an enjoyable evening overall, it fell short of the pleasures of either the best theatre or the type of culinary excellence of which Bayless has proven himself capable at Topolobampo, his Chicago high-end flagship restaurant. It hinted, however, at more powerful imaginings for such blends.

The audience was kept in the visitor welcome center within the Chicago Water Tower until being admitted to the lobby as a group. The theatre's usual lobby was transformed into a bar, with waiters offering each audience member a complimentary margarita (rimmed with salt and the show's namesake cascabel pepper) and two amuse-bouches—"crab on the beach" (of tortilla crumbs and avocado)—along with a lukewarm queso fundido. These items felt almost like an afterthought, as the food was more inspired by Bayless's style of cooking than the creative or inspired cooking expected of Bayless. The theatre itself presented the façade of a boardinghouse, with a table at center stage and Bayless in an upstage kitchen chopping as the audience entered. Most of the audience sat at communal tables, with each place preset with a folded banana leaf and strict instructions not to open it. While perhaps disappointing to an audience familiar with both open kitchens and cooking shows, Bayless's prep work was relatively opaque; perhaps those in the narrow balcony were able to see his work, but the raised stage and his position on it did not afford a view of his skills and their inherent theatricality.

The maître d'hotel, played by Jesse...