Fughettabout Good Taste, Enjoy Good Fun

The groom and his future mother-in-law already hate each other, the guests are mostly drunk and obnoxious and all in attendance can’t help but wonder how long this whole farce of a marriage is going to last. The ceremony has, in short, all the pieces of the “nightmare wedding” cliché.

And that is all the setup that accompanies Joey and Maria’s Comedy Italian Wedding, the long running dinner-theater spectacle which reopened last month at downtown Boston’s Tremont Playhouse. And although its sister production, The Soprano’s Last Supper, mines much the same material for laughs, each show manages to stand on its own and win laughs as a thorough and tremendously funny send-up of, and tribute to, the absurd pop culture depiction of Italian-Americans.

With a cast of characters whose last names are all some variety of pasta, Joey and Maria’s cannot boast subtlety as its strong suit. The various grandmothers are overbearing figures; both bride and groom have ties to the mob; the bridesmaids smoke and wheeze while delivering speeches that tastelessly explore the bride’s purity.

The characterizations are so unabashedly over-the-top, though, that even the most ardent adherents of the political correctness movement soon realize there’s simply no point in getting offended—such a response would involve taking the show seriously, and that misses the point.

As for the show’s interactivity, that means unavoidable contact with the actors, each of whom takes time away from the onstage performance to torment those sitting in the audience. A warning to prospective theatergoers: If you’re an attractive young woman sporting a little cleavage, the priest is likely to help tuck your dinner napkin into the top of your low-cut dress. Men of consenting age will be unable to avoid Joey’s gay cousin Carmine, a man whose distinctive talents include folding napkins into ornate phalluses and placing them on the laps of those made most visibly uncomfortable by his advances.

The wedding itself is a brief procedure, with vows short and to the point. (“Maria, I love you’s, I adoh-wa you’s,” Joey intones vacantly, at which point his funereally-clad mother-in-law bitterly screams, “And you believe him?”) The show breaks briefly while the audience joins a buffet line near the edge of the bar, but even there, no one is safe from harassment. An audience member who declined to eat ziti noodles topped with meat sauce instantly drew the ire of cousin Carmine. “I don’t eat sausage,” the diner explained. “Sure, honey, whatever you say,” Carmine brusquely responded.

While the bulk of each ticket’s cost ($49) evidently doesn’t go towards food, the meal isn’t bad. French bread and an iceberg lettuce salad accompany entrees including lasagna, baked ziti and pastas with pesto cream, marinara and Italian sausage sauces. A chicken dish in a wine-based cream sauce—not, as one would typically expect, a cream-based wine sauce—was especially good. The ample portions should be more than enough to satisfy most, but chocolate “wedding cake” is served after the meal for the especially voracious. (Beer and mixed drinks range between $4 and $8 and are added to a separate tab.)

The show’s comic momentum is sustained through the meal by the actors’ constant interaction with the audience. Countless insights and witticisms are offered, best of all by Maria herself. Giving advice on romance to a 20-something woman, the blushing bride pauses to question the woman’s male escorts. When the three answer in the affirmative to her inquiry about whether they attended “cah-lidge,” she cautions her younger friend that she might want to look elsewhere for companionship: “Oh, they’s too smart, honey. Ya gotta find ya-self a dumber guy.”

The remainder of the show continues along the same course. After the bride and groom take the floor for their first dance, the audience is invited to join them. Though it’s easy during earlier parts of the show to focus solely on Italian-American jokes and the general inanity of the characters, at some point it becomes evident that there is more going on.

Members of the show’s cast perform a demanding dual role: They are at once lampooning and celebrating the archetypes their characters are based on. For every ludicrously insipid comment Joey makes to Maria, for every unflattering altercation between loudmouthed members of the Gnocchi and Ravioli families, there is the appeal of a cast which genuinely rejoices at the vitality of the community it parodies.

It is ultimately this aspect of the show which makes the whole spectacle worthwhile. That the actors bring such unbridled energy to their roles shows their respect for the culture of their origin and helps to elevate Joey and Maria’s Comedy Italian Wedding above its old one-liners and ethnic slurs.

The same can often be said of The Soprano’s Last Supper, a similar show which focuses its energies more narrowly on satirizing the pervasive connection made between the Italian-American community and the mafia. The Soprano’s Last Supper is a meeting of prominent crime families, á la The Godfather, who must reconfigure the balance of power now that Tony, the patriarch of the Baritone family (get it? Sopranos? Baritones? Well, it’s a bit over the characters heads), is being sent up the river. The show gets off to a slow start and could clearly benefit from a few more dress rehearsals, but with regular performances set to start in mid-November, The Soprano’s Last Supper still has time to insert a few more early jokes and find a rhythm as successful as Joey and Maria’s.

At $49 apiece, tickets to the two shows seem prohibitively expensive to many college students, but the cost seems a bit more reasonable when one considers the fact that dinner and an entire evening’s entertainment are included. At the shows’ conclusion, audience members are given free admission to the adjoining bar and dance club located beneath the Tremont House Hotel. The expense involved probably necessitates saving a trip to the Tremont Playhouse for a special evening, but, given the shows’ quality and humor, they would make any evening special.