About the Play:

In Piazza San Domenico is a full-length comedy by Steve Galluccio. A kiss is just a kiss but in this farce a stolen kiss has toxic consequences. Move over Momma Mia, here is a delightful, erudite comedy that will take people back to an era seeking innocence.

In Piazza San Domenico is a comedy of errors that takes place in a bustling neighbourhood of 1952 Naples. The play recounts the story of how one broken engagement ripples throughout friends and family, affecting all of their respective love lives in different ways. The young and beautifully earthy Carmelina faints in the arms of the town philanderer, Tonino, setting off a wave of malicious gossip that seems to infect everyone in town with second thoughts about their current partners – and inexplicable desires for new ones – as often as not consummated on that shadowed spot of carpet behind the statue of San Francesco in the church on the town square. Finally, as if the very gods are angry with these salacious goings-on, an earthquake hits the town, sending the characters into the piazza and keeping them there for the night with a series of ominous aftershocks. As the sun rises, misunderstandings are resolved; the truth will out; and hardened hearts yield to the eternally verdant desires for life.

In Piazza San Domenico premiered in 2009 at the venerable Centaur Theatre, the oldest English-language theatre in Montréal, and became the number one comedy of the season.

Cast: 4 female, 4 male

What people say:

"In Piazza San Domenico is a downright crowd pleaser, a comedy for the masses. As happens very rarely in Montreal theatre, this is a show that can break out of our incestuous little theatrical community past those audience members dying to point out a deus ex machina ending or a character’s lack of motivation, and fulfill the one purpose a comedy was designed for in the beginning: entertainment." — The Warehouse

"Three cheers for light-hearted entertainment! Billed as a romantic comedy inspired by Feydeau, Goldoni and Sophia Loren, it bears the mark of all three, with a dash of trademark Galluccio." — Montreal Gazette

"In Piazza San Domenico harkens to classic Shakespearian comedies." — The Beat Magazine

"Mambo Italiano has entered the realm of the theatrical phenomenon...." — The Globe and Mail

About the Playwright:

Steve Galluccio is a Canadian playwright and screenwriter who has written box office hits in both English and French. His plays are, for the most part, rooted in Italian immigrant behaviour. The son of parents who came to Montréal from Campania, he was raised in Montréal's tight-knit Little Italy, and earned a degree in translation from Concordia University. He taught briefly at Berlitz, audited creative writing classes, and worked in Montréal's vibrant underground theatre scene. He burst into "legit" theatre in with his breakthrough work Mambo Italiano and repeated his box office success with In Piazza San Domenico.