Twenty-five years ago, on their way back to New York — where they worked as actors — David DiSavino and Cynthia Haynes DiSavino "cooked up an idea" to return to Lancaster County someday, not for a visit but to start their own theater.
They were back the next year to pursue that dream, never thinking that one day their Rainbow Dinner Theatre would be entertaining its one-millionth customer.
Tuesday, during a matinee performance of the farce "Hold That Thought," with Cynthia in one of the lead roles and husband David in a supporting role, they passed that milestone.
"We weren't businesspeople; we were artistic people," Cynthia said of those early days.
Starting the theater and turning it into a successful business was "much harder than that initial dream," she said. "But it was worth the journey, because I get to do what I want," which is act.
With a payroll that now ranges between 40 and 50 people — depending on the size of the cast — and an office staff of six, the DiSavinos have come a long way since 1984, when they persuaded the Strasburg Inn to let them use its banquet room for one matinee a week.
By the end of that first year, they were performing two shows a week and were on their way to the five to seven a week they now perform.
In the beginning, they said, they relied on a business model they borrowed from a friend who ran a dinner theater in New Jersey.
"Very early on, we learned we had to make sales calls," Cynthia said.
First, they would call the county offices of aging in the area they were targeting to get lists of contact numbers for the senior social groups there.
Then, they would call the travel coordinators for those groups to tell them about their dinner theater.
"Before you knew it, you would develop a rapport," Cynthia said, and those coordinators would be reserving tickets for a busload of their friends.
"A lot of those group leaders we still see here," David said.
Sometimes, word of mouth from those "groups would beget other groups," David said.
Other times, a fresh round of calls to the same area would bring new groups to the theater.
Last year, David said, they celebrated their 3,000th performance, which prompted him to research the number of customers they've entertained.
Because they have to report audience figures when they pay royalties for the plays they perform, the DiSavinos had a record of those numbers, which they started tracking more closely as the one-millionth mark approached.
They give a lot of credit for the theater's success to their decision to concentrate on comedy in a dinner-theater format.
"Of all the [kinds of] places we worked at [as actors], dinner theater was the only one that made money on ticket prices," David said. "Plus, we both liked comedy."
Unlike in New York, where audiences prefer edgier productions, the Rainbow Dinner Theatre avoids shows that are "too high-brow" or include material that its older audience might find embarrassing.
"They are seeking entertainment when they come to us," David said. "They've come to eat and be entertained."
In 1986, the DiSavinos moved their dinner theater to the Best Western Revere Motor Inn along Route 30 in Paradise, performing matinees in a banquet room five days a week.
Because the motel also needed to use the room, the DiSavinos were not able to schedule evening performances until the Revere's owners, Jim and Kathy Cosgrove, now retired, offered to build a separate facility and lease it to them as a theater.
"They had faith in us," Cynthia said.
"They built it to our specifications," David said.
Rainbow Dinner Theatre moved into that building, which seats a dining audience of 310, in the spring of 1995.
"We are an independent operation, but still tied to [the Revere and the Cosgrove family]," David said.
The business's formal name is Rainbow Productions Inc. with Cynthia functioning as president and artistic director, and David as executive producer.
Now, in addition to matinees on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, the schedule also features evening performances Fridays and Saturdays, twilight performances on select Sundays and double performances some Thursdays and Saturdays.
The DiSavinos said they draw their matinee audiences from a three-hour driving radius and their evening audiences from an 1!-W-hour radius.
Shows usually run about three months with 65 to 72 performances, and the theater is open every month but January, when it closes for an annual cleaning and refitting.
February and March are the most problematic months, the DiSavinos said, because the bus trippers they rely on to fill the seats will often cancel when the weather turns bad.
In the summer, the bus tours slow down, replaced by family vacationers. June, the first month of the summer season, "is traditionally an off-month," Cynthia said, because of the number of graduations and weddings that take up people's time.
Audiences really pick up, she said, right after the Fourth of July.
Often, the DiSavinos said, they poll their audiences to find out what their favorite comedies are, and then schedule one of those popular titles for the fall season. This year, it will be "Barefoot in the Park."
"Fall was the strongest season until the first gas-price increases hit," Cynthia said. That was three or four years ago, when there was a trend for gas prices to rise right after Labor Day.
Last fall was an exception, she added, saying that people may have become desensitized to higher gas prices by then.
November and December, when they stage a Christmas show, is also always a strong season for them, the DiSavinos said.
This year, they will be performing "Deck the Halls and Clean the Kitchen," a play that Cynthia wrote back in 1997.
When you run your own theater, she said, you end up using everything you learned in college.
"We pour all we know about theater into that venue," she said.
David, for instance, was good in math and now handles the business's finances, and Cynthia designs stage settings.
But it's still the DiSavinos love of acting that drives the business, and unlike New York, where they used to wait for the phone to ring with casting calls, they have no shortage of roles.
Cynthia said she and Casey Allwyn, a longtime collaborator and her co-star in the current production, were talking recently and concluded that "we probably have had more time on stage than most Broadway actors."
Dennis Larison is editor of the business section and can be reached by telephone at 291-8753 or by e-mail at dlarison@lnpnews.com.
