Joey and Maria's Comedy Italian Wedding is an interactive dinner theater presentation and the longest-running presentation of its kind in the United States. Rights to the show are owned by Dillstar Productions of Rancho Cucamonga, California and it is presently running in Anaheim, California, San Diego, California, Palm Springs, California, Chicago, Illinois, Hartford,CT and Boston, Massachusetts.
The show was written by the husband-and-wife team of Paul and Darlyne Franklin.
Audience members are active participants in the wedding nuptials and subsequent reception, which take place in a restaurant in Boston's North End owned by the bride's cousin and the play's master of ceremonies, Carmine Cannoli. The wedding, performed by "St. Anthony's" parish priest Pastor Fazool, brings together the families of two young lovers, Joseph Anthony Gnocchi and Maria Angelina Cavatelli. The dramatis personae are all, in fact, named after Italian foodstuffs. Chaos ensues during the ceremony with the unexpected arrival of Joey's provocatively dressed ex-girlfriend, Viola Vermicelli. Viola, it seems, is still in love with Joey. Despite Joey's roving eye, he's very much in love with Maria and loudly protests Viola's arrival. After the couple is joined, the cast leaves the room and are reintroduced one at a time by Carmine. A toast is raised by Joey's scatterbrained best man, Rocco Ravioli. During the toast, dinner is being served to the guests. Upon its completion, the cast moves about the tables, chatting and flirting with the guests. After dinner, the party itself commences with traditional Italian-American flourishes such as a sing-along and a tarantella. The traditional bouquet and garter tosses place the guests who catch them in a rather bizarre and extremely funny onstage situation in which the male guest is asked to remove the garter from the leg of the female guest using only his teeth. The arrival of Maria's Mafioso godfather Don Ziti (often played by a selected good-sport audience member) also means the arrival of a large sum of money for the new couple. The "money" is handed over to Joey's cousin, bridesmaid Louisa Ravioli, for safekeeping. Naturally, the money later turns up missing and a male guest is "accused" of stealing it. He's led out the door and is met by a hail of gunfire...which misses. Joey & Maria come back dressed in snazzy traveling clothes, ready for one final dance, then off to honeymoon in Vegas and spend some of that wedding dough... "and they all lived Happily Ever After!"
Very few parts of Joey and Maria's Comedy Italian Wedding are scripted, with the momentum of the play maintained by ad-libbed slapstick humor.
Famous quotes containing the words maria, comedy, italian and/or wedding:
“Just as language has no longer anything in common with the thing it names, so the movements of most of the people who live in cities have lost their connexion with the earth; they hang, as it were, in the air, hover in all directions, and find no place where they can settle.”
—Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926)
“It is comedy which typifies, where it is tragedy which individualizes; where tragedy observes the nice distinctions between man and man, comedy stresses those broad resemblances which make it difficult to tell people apart.”
—Harry Levin (b. 1912)
“If the study of his images
Is the study of man, this image of Saturday,
This Italian symbol, this Southern landscape, is like
A waking, as in images we awake,
Within the very object that we seek,
Participants of its being.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“Come away!
For you shall hence upon your wedding day.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)