Steeplechase at Liberty Deli, 2722 Alki Ave SW, 935-8420. $29 with meal, $15 show only. Fri-Sat at 6:30 pm, Thurs show at 7:30 pm. Through Sept 28.

Like Adrian Ryan, I've always found dinner theater an attractive notion--the clink of glasses and cutlery accompanying performance has a hallowed weight. From lordly medieval entertainments to European cabaret, pleasures gastronomic and theatrical have historically been the two great tastes that taste great together.

Down on lovely Alki Beach, the Liberty Deli keeps up the tradition, offering homespun grub and performance in a very relaxed setting. The buffet, featuring foods mentioned in the script, provides solid, basic dishes with slightly fancy flourishes--halibut and catfish with black-eyed peas, pesto penne, baked chicken, mushroom-veggie pâté, and a densely flavorful "liver paste" with a little bacon to lend it smoky weight. With iced tea to wash it down and mocha-pecan pie for dessert, the dinner strikes an admirable note--soul food with a dash of swank. My favorite, however, was the coleslaw, made the way God intended; I know it's a controversial position, but I like my slaw lightly vinegary, and no mayonnaise to muck up the cabbage. Thankfully, the Liberty Deli agrees.

Good food is one thing, but proper dinner theater demands a fitting accompaniment. Mysteries, comedies, and vaudeville are accessible enough to allow the audience to divide its attention between plate and play. Unfortunately, the Liberty Deli's current production, Seascape, by Edward Albee, isn't the best choice.

Characteristically Albee-ish, Seascape finds an aging, long-suffering married couple miscommunicating with each other for the first act, then miscommunicating with a pair of talking reptiles for the second. Occasionally funny, Seascape's problem isn't opacity or the amateurish production (that's part of the charm), but that it's a dated old thing, and has aged as gracelessly as its main characters.

But never mind the shortcomings of the current production. The Liberty Deli has a good thing going--great down-home food and enormous entertainment potential. I happily await its next production: a spooky Ibsen piece for Halloween. BRENDAN KILEY

Oil City Symphony

Taproot Theatre, 204 N 85th St, 781-9707. $18-$26. Wed-Thurs at 7:30 pm, Fri-Sat at 8 pm, with additional Sat matinee at 2 pm. Through Oct 5.

In contrast to Seascape, Taproot Theatre's Oil City Symphony is perfect dinner-theater fare. Four musicians who went to high school in Oil City, PA, reunite in the gymnasium to do a recital for us, the alumni of Oil City High. And that's about it.

Heavy on faded '80s ambiance and light on story, revelation, or thought-provoking material, Symphony is charmingly lighthearted, sometimes funny, and sometimes musically interesting, in a novelty-show kind of way. The four performers switch around on drums, piano, violin, synth, bass, and flute, and kick out some wicked four-part harmonies. Dramaturge Carolyn Conley writes that the show is "a musical celebration of suburban innocence and values," and she's absolutely right. There's nothing wrong with that particular kind of fantasy, and I don't want to seem the slouching, jaded hipster who needs a lot of edgy sex, drugs, and cussing in his theater. Heck, the audience seemed to eat it up, doing the hokey-pokey, singing along to "In the Sweet By and By," and rocking out to a lite-Muzaky version of "In-a-Gadda-Da-Vida."

Maybe I'm too young to feel nostalgic about concerts in high school gyms, maybe I'm just a curmudgeon, but all the energy and musical wizardry that went into Symphony should, by my lights, have had a worthier object. Now if they'd only turn Oil City Symphony into a small-town-innocence-cabaret-with-baked-chicken-and-iced-tea--then we'd be getting somewhere.

The performance aside, a hearty huzzah to Mark Lund for his stellar set design. The theater is, for all purposes, a high school gym, complete with a basketball hoop retracted against the ceiling and oversized cloth sports championship pennants on the wall. Though the memories aren't my all-time favorites, Mr. Lund successfully evokes the pep rallies of yore.

In the end, Oil City Symphony is like a political fundraiser or hanging out with the in-laws--a diversion greatly improved when accompanied by dinner. BRENDAN KILEY

Don's Party and In Search of Dulcinea

Wade Madsen & Dancers

Broadway Performance Hall. Performed last week only, Thurs-Sun Sept 5-8.

Don's Party isn't really dance, although it is carefully choreographed, and because the span of the work encompasses a cocktail party taking place somewhere in the 1950s, this physical precision comes back round to remind us how carefully choreographed a work is social life. The characters--the lovely, slightly brittle hostess, the blowsy drunk, the lady-killer--speak in excerpts from Don Quixote, which here read as social platitudes, boastful rationalization, and cocktail chitchat, all the more so because the cast members aren't actually speaking, but lip-synching themselves. "No more proverbs!" one of them intones at one point, and a tiredness--both physical and psychical--descends. The talk gets heavy, elements repeat, you realize you've seen one woman crawl across the floor toward her martini glass about six times. It begins to feel a little crazy, a little worn, like Elizabeth Taylor at the end of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf. There's a lot of charm to this piece, but it's the kind of charm that comes before knowledge, like innocence that's actually more like ignorance. Given the happy-go-lucky period piece-ness, you feel that these sophisticated characters are in for something of a ride when the late '60s finally hit, and that perhaps that's part of the point. That this is invoked so subtly, without actually being suggested, is what makes Don's Party darker and more interesting than its kooky surface suggests.

In Search of Dulcinea is, according to Madsen, also inspired by Don Quixote, although to me it looked less like Cervantes than Beckett, a clump of frightened characters stranded on a plain somewhere, negotiating... something. It's a deliberately disjointed work, one that allows for the side-by-side existence of an awkward but also delicate pas de deux and a brief but snappy gang-step, like out of West Side Story. It was so strange, and it kind of broke my heart. EMILY HALL