Share wine and cabaret over a long Lisbon dinner

1. 

   01The revue

   Teatro de revista

   Portugal's popular stage form arrived in the 19th century and had its greatest success in the 20th: comic and satirical sketches strung between musical numbers, with dancers dressed in plumes and sequins. Under the Estado Novo's censors, a revue could still slip criticism of the regime past them. That mix of glitter and cheek is the local ancestor of a cabaret night, though a revue plays in a theatre and yours happens at a table.

2. 

   02The park

   Parque Mayer and its vedettes

   Vedette is the French word for the star at the top of the bill, and from the early 20th century it came to mean the leading woman in a cabaret or revue, expected to sing, dance and act. Lisbon's revue found its home at Parque Mayer, a pleasure ground beside Avenida da Liberdade that opened in June 1922 and was later called the cathedral of the Portuguese revue. Three of its theatres remain.

3. 

   03The cabaret

   Paris, tables and a host

   The word cabaret probably comes from an old term for a small room. By the late 15th century Paris cabarets were places that served food with their wine, on a tablecloth. Le Chat Noir, opened in Montmartre in 1881, is often credited as the first of the modern kind, with drinkers seated at tables, variety acts on a stage and a host working the room. Eight years later the Moulin Rouge opened at the foot of the same hill.

4. 

   04The supper club

   A whole night in one seat

   In the 1930s and 1940s, American supper clubs turned dinner into a destination, where you could spend the entire evening from the cocktail hour to the nightclub-style entertainment after the meal. Dinner theatre runs on the same bargain, sometimes with the performance secondary to the food and sometimes the reverse. The format explains why a long table booking and a show can feel like one single ticket.

5. 

   05The fado house

   Lisbon's own supper and a singer

   Lisbon already had a local habit of eating while someone performs: the small fado houses where a singer and guitars share a room with the dinner tables. Parque Mayer's grounds held such houses among their restaurants and carousels. The music is a different art altogether, and the mood is nothing like a cabaret's, but it means sitting down to food and a show feels familiar here.

Sources for this section: the Portuguese Wikipedia articles on teatro de revista, Parque Mayer, the Capitólio and the Maria Vitória theatre, and the English Wikipedia articles on cabaret, Le Chat Noir, the vedette, supper clubs and dinner theatre. None of these strands describes a particular night's acts.