Daily Inspiration Quote by Ted Shackelford

Thirty years ago is doing double duty here: it marks time, and it marks loss. Ted Shackelford isn’t just reminiscing about a niche entertainment format; he’s quietly diagnosing a whole ecosystem that’s thinned out. “Dinner theatre” evokes a particular middlebrow American ritual - community-minded, a little corny, reliably booked for anniversaries and group outings. Calling it a “going concern” borrows the language of business, not art, which is the tell. The point isn’t that the shows were better; it’s that the model was viable. People bought tickets, venues stayed open, actors got paid, and work existed between bigger gigs.

The subtext is an actor’s pragmatic nostalgia: not for glamour, but for infrastructure. Dinner theatre is the kind of circuit that sustains working performers, especially outside New York and L.A., and its decline signals fewer rungs on the ladder. Shackelford’s phrasing also carries a soft lament about attention. Dinner theatre requires an audience willing to show up in person, on time, and commit to a shared experience that’s part performance, part social night out. That’s harder to compete with in an era of streaming, on-demand everything, and fragmented leisure.

There’s an implicit cultural critique, too, tucked inside the understatement. When a form like dinner theatre fades, what disappears isn’t only a quirky genre; it’s a local civic habit, a venue where entertainment and community overlap. Shackelford names it plainly because, in the industry, plain talk is how you register a loss that doesn’t make headlines.