Welcome to “Slice of Celebration” – a new attraction at Disney World that brings America’s macabre fascination with a suburban family murder to life in a murder dinner theater.
From the precise hedge cutouts during drinks and appetizers, this attraction begins with the hyperreality of the suburban setting to reveal haunting proximities to a family that will eventually be killed in this theatrical performance. The main course is a seated dinner of barbecued steaks and burgers with uncanny, voyeuristic views into the glass house as the family continues a typical daily life moments before disruption. A brief interlude transports guests into increasingly surreal views of a murder scene through a glass roof and dioramas of the victims’ lives until, lastly, the final course of gushing apple pie and cheesecake rolls along on a conveyor belt interrupted by autopsies on the victims’ bodies.
Through choreographed encounters with the site of murder, this dinner theater combines the culture and aesthetic of Disney with forensic crime scene processing into an architecturally coordinated rupture. In “Slice of Celebration,” crime scene forensics are retooled to explicate how reputational, corporate, cultural, and societal damage implicates the performance of suburbanity and theater of the “happiest place on Earth
