What was the Windmill Dinner Theatre?
For a decade the best-known dinner reservation in north Scottsdale came with a curtain time. The Windmill Dinner Theatre stood on the southeast corner of Scottsdale Road and Shea Boulevard, and through the 1970s it was where the Valley went to eat, watch a television star do a bedroom farce, and be served by waiters who could sing.
The Windmill was a mainstay of the American dinner-theater circuit, the touring machine that kept stars of stage, screen and television working between series. Van Johnson, Forrest Tucker and Jamie Farr all headlined here; the repertoire ran from The Music Man and Once Upon a Mattress to Pajama Tops, and more than a hundred productions played the room. Scottsdale historians list it alongside Trader Vic’s, the Pink Pony and Bobby McGee’s among the decade’s most popular restaurants, which tells you how thoroughly the town treated it as a night out rather than a theater.
What made it the Valley’s own was the Barnstormers — the singing and dancing wait staff who brought your dinner and then performed, and who were, by most accounts, often better than the imported names. One of them, Kevin McNally, went on to double for Noah Wyle on ER.
And it is the stage attached to one of Arizona’s most notorious crimes. Bob Crane, star of Hogan’s Heroes, was starring in Beginner’s Luck at the Windmill when his co-star Victoria Ann Berry found him bludgeoned to death in his Winfield Place apartment on June 29, 1978. The case was tried in 1994 and remains officially unsolved. The Windmill closed sometime in the 1980s, and the Crane story is most of what the wider world remembers of it.
The formula: eat first, then the star
Dinner theater ran on a fixed script. You arrived early, ate a full dinner at long tables angled toward the stage, and then the lights dropped and a name you knew from television walked out in a comedy that asked nothing of anyone. The Windmill executed the national formula faithfully — the food was the price of admission, the star was the draw, and the whole evening cost a fraction of a Fifth Avenue supper club. For a Scottsdale family in 1976, it was the special occasion that did not require a jacket.
The Barnstormers broke the script. The wait staff were performers — auditioned, rehearsed, and staged between courses — and their numbers turned the meal into the first act. Regulars learned to sit near the aisles and risers where the servers performed, to order before the room got loud, and to treat the marquee name as a bonus. Barnstormer alumni still hold reunions, and the theater-history sites that catalog Phoenix’s stage past devote as much space to identifying them in old photographs as to the stars they served.
The location was a bet on the north. The corner of Scottsdale and Shea in the early 1970s sat at the frontier of McCormick Ranch, the master-planned community that would pull Scottsdale’s money north over the decade. The Windmill got there before the Registry Resort and the rest of the corridor’s showrooms, and for a few years it was the entertainment anchor of a neighborhood that was still mostly plans and citrus stumps.
Bob Crane, the Barnstormers, and the end of the circuit
The Crane case fixed the Windmill in national memory and distorted local memory in the process. The facts are stark: Crane had flown in to play Beginner’s Luck, was living at Winfield Place a short drive from the theater, and on the afternoon of June 29, 1978 was found dead after failing to appear for lunch. His friend John Henry Carpenter, who had flown to Phoenix days earlier, became the suspect; blood matching Crane’s type was found in Carpenter’s rental car. He was arrested in 1992, tried in 1994, acquitted, and maintained his innocence until his death in 1998.
But the Windmill was not a crime scene; it was a working room that put on more than a hundred shows, and its real legacy is people. The Barnstormers were a genuine Scottsdale institution — a farm team for the Valley’s performers at a moment when the city had few other stages — and the fact that a theater-history archive can still name a dozen of them says more about what the room meant than any celebrity does.
The end came with the genre. Through the 1980s the dinner-theater circuit lost its stars to cable and syndication money, its audiences to home video, and its rooms to rising land values. The Scottsdale and Shea corner was worth more as retail than as a buffet with a stage, and the Windmill closed sometime that decade — the exact year, like its opening, is not reliably recorded, and we have not invented one. Scottsdale’s entertainment dining moved to the Registry’s showroom and then to Bobby McGee’s-style theme rooms, neither of which asked its waiters to sing.
Honest assessment: the food at the Windmill was never the point, and the plays were disposable by design. What the room offered was a formula the Valley has never replaced — a full evening, dinner through curtain call, for a middle-class price, with local kids on the risers who could genuinely perform. That it is remembered for a murder is history’s unfairness. That it is remembered at all is the Barnstormers’ doing.