Lazy Susan Dinner Theater

This place gets 3 stars for the talent and 1 for the food, so that explains the 2 stars over there.

I've been to the theater a few times and the performances have been really good. The last performance I saw was Putnam County Spelling Bee. Very funny show that was well done BUT this is a dinner theater and the food is pretty foul. In addition, the food isn't even refreshed fast enough. We weren't even the last of the people to get up, but the salad was empty and so were some of the sides. The desserts didn't even have be wanting more - and that's pretty amazing.

In fact, the food issue hasn't been changed since I'd been YEARS ago. I hope the management reads these reviews and does something about it.

Through the years, I've seen this place advertised. I've seen group meetups for this place, and finally a Groupon came through. I would not pay anymore than a Groupon price for this experience.

Circus Circus Buffet meets Home Town Community Theatre.

Parking is tricky here, in fact, get there early just to park. The theatre is located on a hill once you turn on to their street. If you want to get out of the parking lot at the end of the show, my advice is to leave right after the lights go out, or leave early.

Food- They assign you a specific time to enter the buffet world, that time is determined by your arrival to the theatre. Seating is done by reservation time, so if you reserved your seats weeks prior, then you will get a good table. We reserved the day of the event, since I did not read the Groupon carefully. We sat in the back of the theatre. That was not so bad since the theatre is not big. Back to buffet talk, picture starches, pot pies, chicken, roast beef(that is actually given to you by their staff, so you don't get 'all you can eat'). There's plenty of mac and cheese, mashed potatoes, and TONS of bread. Dessert is made by the bountiful, bread pudding, strawberry cream pies, made in large vats. Your admission price includes tea, coffee, and water. Soda and soda water is $1.50 and NO FREE REFILLS, so beware. They have a full bar, and they serve what appeared to be 'boxed wine'.

The Show-The stage takes over the entire front of the theatre. The cast is also your wait and hostess staff, yes, you see those characters several times during your experience. We saw Agatha Christi's "The Unexpected Guest". The cast was good, they were very professional and they portrayed their characters well.

I thought the intermission( 35 minutes) was WAY too long. It made for the overall experience of 4.5 hours, way too long at this outdated theatre. One hint, the women's restroom was ridiculous, they had 4 stalls, and 1 of them was out of order. None of the toilets really flushed and women waited in long lines.

I really love going to the Lazy Susan. The shows are always wonderful and the acting is very good. I just really wish they would do some updating. (Tables,Chairs, decor)
The food is so/so it's usually lukewarm when you get it. So, I think it would be alot better if it were a little warmer. The service is always nice and friendly. If the food were better I would buy a season pass to all the shows. But for the so/so food and wonderful show, I usually only manage to make about 1 show per year.

SAVE YOURSELVES! YOU CAN'T GET YOUR TIME BACK NO MATTER HOW HARD YOU TRY!!!

We bought a Groupon for this place with some friends and we were very optimistic about the whole thing.

We arrived at 5:00pm when the voucher said to. There was a line out the door. It was around 40 degrees and drizzling. After about 25 minutes the line started moving. There was about 30 people outside waiting. Upon getting inside the place, there was a desk 20 feet beyond the entrance where they had just started taking people's tickets to let them in. Maybe they didn't know we were coming? They were cool with letting us wait in the cold with plenty of room inside.

We got to the desk and provided our vouchers. We told them we had friends with us a few people back in the line. She said, "You will be a party of two. You had to make reservations together at that time." I didn't understand their process so I was forgiving and just said, that's their policy. Whatever. Let's go in.

The place is straight out of 1971 and it smells like it too. Really. It smelled. Bad. And old. And just gross. Most of the patrons seem to have stopped progressing with the zeitgeist around 1971 as well. The crowd is more of a senior crowd than anything else. It was like the "fancy side" of an old truckstop in Mississippi...in 1971.

The table cloths were all grandma's fancy floral table cloths covered by plexi-glass. The lighting was super low so you can't really see how awful it is unless you really look. They put us at a table so small that the table cloth that covered the plexi-glass was a NAPKIN.

There were two or three four-seat tables directly behind us that could have easily been used to accomodate our sitting with the rest of our party, but that was too overwhelming for them to even consider. We didn't say anything. Just in aw of the whole experience.

They gave us our number and said, "Here is your number. They will call your number when you're invited to go to the buffet. But we just ask that before you go back and get seconds and sevenths and eighths, that you let other people get a first turn at the buffet. Not that you would, but...."

The show hadn't started yet by 6:20 when we finally got "invited" to the buffet. We got there and I met the most miserable lady passing out some sand-paper-style roast beef. She didn't smile, she just scowled. You say, "Thank you!" and smile to try to cheer her up, but she just ignores it. If she were my employee, I'd fire her. There was no gravy for the roast beef. No au jus, no nothing.

They had penne pasta with like a béchamel, but not in a good way. There was some fried chicken and that was about it. Some marshmallow and coconut thing(?) and for dinner rolls, they had...sandwich bread. Like Sunbeam, plain white toast in place of a proper dinner roll. Oh, and they had huge cinnamon buns which I would encourage many of the patrons to politely pass-on, but considering I saw some coming back from the buffet with TWO plates.

My wife and I could not eat the dry roast beef so we asked our waitress for any kind of sauce. BBQ sauce, Ketchup (yuk but whatever), A1 (again, yuk) but anything. All she had to offer us was Tabasco Sauce and she said she got that from the bar because they use it to make drinks.

So we ate the chicken and the pasta and were really disgusted with all of it. We kept looking for rats, but it was too dark to see any if they were there. I'm sure THAT was no accident...

6:45 I started feeling claustrophobic. It was dark. Packed tight. No room. Small table. Horrible chairs. The show STILL had not started yet. We got up and told our friends, "Sorry, we're going to jet. We're done eating. The show hasn't started yet. It's not like we're even allowed to sit together, so we're taking off.

It felt so good to get out of there! To breathe fresh air! To reassure ourselves that it's not 1971 but 2013! But we'll never get those two hours back. We'll never be able to unsmell that smell; unsee that fancy 70's honkytonk that looks like great grandmaw's @#$ exploded in it; unsee the bathrooms with the old kitchen style goose neck faucets; untaste the horrid beef jerky that was made without sugar and passed off by a miserable angry hawnkytawnk lunch lady- it happened. . . And it's something I'm going to have to live with for the rest of my life.

Please. Save yourself. Don't do it. . . Unless you're purty dawgone country, luvs you some Conway Twitty and think Applebee's is a "purty good place". If that's you, you should TOTALLY GO! YOU'LL LOVE IT!!! :-D

Save yourself the money - don't go!

I found a Groupon for this, and as I quite enjoy dinner theater, I decided to give it a shot. Seriously the place was not worth the half off price, let alone the full price and I ended up leaving at intermission.

Food - Buffet style, limited options, COLD and I was in the first group to go up to the buffet. Do they really think potato salad, grizzly roast beef and disgusting penne afredo (I love pasta but this was NASTY!) is worth $44 per person? I thought perhaps the dessert buffet might make up for leaving half of my food on my itty bitty dinner plate... Wrong again. The desserts were picked clean, slow to be replaced and everything was pudding this, pudding that. Not all that appetizing. :(

Staff - My waitress couldn't have tried to phone it in any more than she already did. I ordered a cocktail at 6:30 and was never asked again if I wanted a replacement drink even though the show didn't start until 8:00. Waitress was nice enough but too many tables assigned to one person, and when everyone arrives at the same time, it becomes a cluster.

Show - I wasn't expecting a broadway show in Woodbridge, but this was mediocre at best. Over acted and punny jokes that fell flat for the most part. The crowd only belly laughed once in 90 minutes which is sad when we are watching a comedy.

Facility - My dining room chair was ripped up as were all the chairs at my table. So uncomfortable to sit on when you're wearing a light summer dress. The decor was mismatched and utterly outdated. The ladies restroom has 4 stalls, only three of which were is working order, and only 2 sinks!! The paper towel holder was empty (the show hadn't even started yet....), so the staff just dumped a roll on the counter. The exterior reminded me of two mobile homes shoved together.... Seriously, this place is a dump!

My childhood favorite. Google says it's permanently closed which really disappointments me because I'm going back after 5 years and and I would have loved to take my boyfriend there!

I can honestly say the Lazy Susan Dinner Theater got one major point right---they are lazy!

I recently obtained a Groupon and redeemed it last weekend. So even with discounted tickets I felt as if I were ripped off.

Aside from the actual play (I won't review that specifically), the food, the decor, and the building were laughable.

The bad: This location is a little difficult to find if you've never been before as it sits on a hill behind a tall row of trees that hide not only the driveway up but also the entire building itself. Once that Where's Waldo moment is concluded the place looks like you stepped back into the 60s. There's dark panels lining the entire theater, the lights are extremely low, the tables are jammed close together (hope you don't want privacy!), there's exposed beams above your head---and some leakage in various spots.

The worse: Lazy's promises "one of the finest buffets EVER offered by a dinner theater" and touts Pennsylvania Dutch entrees. None of this is quite true. Remember that low lighting I mentioned? Good luck seeing the goopy food at the 15 item buffet. Roast beef, chicken, fish---don't hold your breath. The dried out, overly chewy piece of beef is served to you (you take whatever portion the server gives you), the chicken was a little undercooked and very under-seasoned (as was most of the foods), and the fish---just small squares of a "fish" substance with a lemon on top that had been sitting in a pan of mystery liquid. None of the foods were labeled, I didn't feel entirely safe with their refrigeration process (i.e. sitting dishes with mayonnaise in bowls of ice), and a lot of things looked questionable to try. Even the desserts weren't appetizing looking despite their attempt to drown them in whip cream or chocolate.

The weird: The bathrooms are very retro---so none of the toilets flush properly, the waitress seemed like an animatronic person, dead eyes and all, just spouting off an obvious script of a greeting, the sodas not included in the dinner price come in cups half the size of the initial cup you receive, the spotlight is in the back of the room and not raised so it will shed light on you if you're in its path during the show.

Bottom line: Don't bother! If an establishment is silly enough to name themselves "lazy" that should be a good indicator of things to come. You're better off seeing a play in DC and then going out to a nice restaurant afterward. It will cost about the same and you'll be much more satisfied. They get one star for giving me a funny cautionary tale to regale my friends.

This place has been around for years and when you drive up it shows. When you walk in, it shows. When you sit down, it shows. It's one of those places where the wait staff double as the actors and stage crew. I've been here just a handful of times over the years and I think the shows are pretty good. They make due with what they have. It's almost like community theater. Or maybe the other way around. I've never been disappointed with any show. The dining area isn't so bad with the way it's spaced out. You might feel like your sitting on top of the people around you, but that's kind or typical for any place like this.

However, with that said, the one thing that HAS been disappointing over the years is the food. As you are seated, they give you a table number. You have to wait until your number is called and then you make your way to the buffet. They never seem to get this part right. If your number is called after you've been sitting for a while or got there after 7pm, then it's like "you snooze, you loose". Often there is no salad left, something that you wanted to go with your salad is gone, and usually a couple of other items are gone and no one replaces them in a timely manner. So if you are not the first persons to get in there, then the buffet looks like a desolate wasteland. Even after you get the food, I think that even though it's not that good, it's not that bad.

I enjoy a good show. I feel that is their strong point and that's why I come back from time to time.

Below mediocre food and theater performance. Charge an arm and a leg and you don't even get free sodas!

It was once, say 20 years ago, a nice place to have dinner and a show. The buffet became tired and old in serving the same selections year after year. The owners failed to keep up and stay on trend with the industry. I see that it is now closed. Sad. Wish someone would buy it and revive it. It would take some work but there is currently no dinner theatre in Northern Virginia that I am aware of.