Word: joey
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...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...
...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...
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...
...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...