Like most critics, I don't normally pay attention to what the crowd thinks. One reason is that I usually see shows on opening night; those audiences, packed with friends, family, staff, subscribers and other well-wishers, are a notoriously partisan lot. So given are they to urge the proceedings on that every joke becomes uproarious, every sentiment inspired. And the plot, these patrons would have you believe, is simply the most amusing, touching, frightening, entertaining, mind-bending thing that they've ever experienced. And if you don't clap until your hands hurt, you're an insensitive prig. I swear I've seen even the chorus line get a standing ovation.

Well, over the past few weeks I surveyed a developing cottage industry in Houston: dinner theater. To say that the three productions I broke bread with -- Let's Kill the Boss at the Marriott West Loop, Prime Time Murder at Renata's Restaurant and The Illusionist at Old San Francisco Steak House -- left me with indigestion is putting it mildly. But at each performance I was a minority of one (two, if you count my companion of the evening). Everybody else ate it up, every last crumb and wiggle. And it wasn't opening night anywhere, either; in fact, two of the three offerings have been running for months. So what's going on here? Are my tastes too finicky? Are the consumers too easy to please? What does dinner and a show mean, anyhow?

First and foremost, dinner theater is a package deal, sort of a drive-in movie in the flesh. For some thirty bucks, you get an adventure and a meal along the lines of what you'd expect at The Black-Eyed Pea. The play shouldn't be heavy, since the food usually is. But the play should be rich, since the food usually isn't. Though there are a few first-class dinner theater venues around the country, with more or less fine dining and good acting (improbable as it may sound, Burt Reynolds has one, in Florida), more often dinner theater is all about mass-market spectacle, a combination of commissary food and middling theatrics.

So you might think -- as I did -- that everybody would tally things up to see if, on the whole, they got their money's worth. Can one, that is, be regaled by a prix fixe? I figured that since a ticket to Houston community theater ranges from $8 to $15, the artistic level of a dinner theater should at least match that of community theater. That leaves another $15 to $20 to cover the cost of the meal, which should translate into fare somewhere between blue-plate specials and catered affairs. But at each of the three dinner theaters I visited, I could barely stomach the craft, and while I didn't play with my food, I didn't much relish it.

I seemed to be the only attendee calculating that way, though. The rest of the audiences -- of all ages and makeup except, curiously, the geriatric set -- had a grand time, laughing at the lame jokes in the two original murder-mystery comedies and oohing and aahing at the tired tricks in The Illusionist, an overwrought drama with magic. The audiences couldn't have cared less that they'd seen these TV antics a thousand times before -- or if they did care, they cared a great deal, relishing the very familiarity of what they were seeing. They'd purchased their tickets and, like at an amusement park, they wanted to be taken for a ride. They came for a show, they were going to enjoy it; they paid for a meal, they were going to eat it. So (and I'm no Alison Cook), while my beef bordelaise at one site was a tough carcass lubricated with indeterminate goo and my strawberry parfait at another was little more than flavored whipped cream, everybody else's hit the spot. Plates were cleaned; I didn't see one doggy bag. People were hungry. Thinking about how, really, the two parts didn't add up to money well spent -- how if they'd forked over the dough to experience these offerings separately they could've eaten better and seen better -- would have only gotten in the way.

At Let's Kill the Boss, the assertively friendly cast of caricatures works the room so compulsively that it's hard to even take a bite from the three-course (incorrectly labeled as four-course) meal. The actors prod you to jot down everything that looks suspicious, helping you solve what passes for riddles in your "mystery packet" ("Like a straggler at a party / or a rat inside a tomb/ the murderer is often / the last one in the room") and letting you know that you can use the Monopoly-style money inserted in your program to bribe them for clues. The proceedings are relentless: pop tunes with "money" in the title blare in the background while the actors -- given such lines as "He's tighter than a pair of Spandex biking shorts on Rush Limbaugh and as popular as Ann Richards in a Playboy centerfold" -- are made up so heavily that you'd think they were playing an arena, not aisles. They allow no respite whatsoever. Privacy is not an option. In fact, you may have to sit at a table with strangers.