Kitchen Kabaret (Complete Show Audio)

Kitchen Kabaret 1982 – 1994

“Kraft proudly presents the show that has the whole town cooking!” With that announcement, the curtain rose on Kitchen Kabaret, the Audio-Animatronic musical revue inside The Land pavilion at EPCOT Center. It opened with the park on October 1, 1982, and for a little over eleven years its singing groceries delivered the most cheerful nutrition lesson ever staged — a 13-minute vaudeville about the four food groups, hosted by the tireless Bonnie Appetite.

The bill ran like a proper variety show. Bonnie opened with the “Meal Time Blues,” then returned in showbiz attire alongside the condiment band, the Kitchen Krackpots, to “Chase Those Meal Time Blues Away.” Mr. Dairy Goods crooned his way out of a refrigerator to introduce “The Stars of the Milky Way” — Miss Cheese, Miss Yogurt and Miss Ice Cream. The Cereal Sisters harmonized through “Boogie Woogie Bakery Boy,” Hamm & Eggz traded groan-worthy jokes in their “Meat Ditties,” and the Colander Combo and the Fiesta Fruit brought down the house with “Veggie Veggie Fruit Fruit,” Bonnie descending on a crescent moon in a Carmen Miranda hat. Then the whole company — 31 Audio-Animatronic performers in all — returned for the finale medley, and the curtains, Kraft logo and all, closed over the stage.

The end arrived by way of the sponsor’s office rather than the stage. Kraft had presented The Land since opening day, but it withdrew its sponsorship on September 26, 1993, and Nestlé took over the pavilion the very next day. A kitchen stocked with Kraft products could not stay on the menu, and Kitchen Kabaret closed on January 3, 1994. Its replacement kept the recipe and changed the music: Food Rocks, a benefit-concert spoof of contemporary pop and rock, opened in the same theater on March 26, 1994, and ran until 2004, when the space eventually gave way to Soarin’. The Kabaret cast never entirely left, either — the Colander Combo and Fiesta Fruit still turn up at the Epcot International Food & Wine Festival, and “Veggie Veggie Fruit Fruit” earned a spot in the Epcot Forever fireworks show.

This recording runs 18 minutes and 43 seconds — noticeably longer than the 13-minute stage show, so the complete bill plays at full length, every act in order from Bonnie’s blues to the finale. When the curtain falls, keep the pavilion’s sounds going with The Land Complete Area Music 1982 – 2005, the loops that played in this same building across the same years, and then wander Future World with Journey into Imagination and Horizons, two more opening-era voices of EPCOT Center.