About the Play:

The St. Leonard Chronicles is a full-length comedy by Steve Galluccio. From the award-winning author of stage hits Mambo Italiano and In Piazza San Domenico comes a delicious, saucy comedy about a young couple with roots in the Italian neighbourhood of St. Léonard in Montréal.

The St. Leonard Chronicles is a heartwarming comedy about a young Italian-Canadian couple from the St. Léonard borough, one of Montréal's East End Italian communities, and their meddling, fretting family. Terry and Robert's newly renovated duplex has barely a hint of gilded rococo – not just a cultural infraction, but also an ominous sign that all is not as it should be. Eager to break free of family ties that are bound too tight, Terry and Robert announce they're they're selling the house and moving away from the old neighbourhood to the affluent anglophone suburb of Beaconsfield, an almost criminal act for some Italian-Canadians. When they confess their plans to their parents over a Sunday family dinner, floodgates open to other unspoken desires and revelations, turning conservative St. Léonard values upside down.

The St. Leonard Chronicles opened the 2013-14 season at the venerable Centaur Theatre in Old Montréal and sold out its initial run by its first weekend. The play was extended before it even opened and went on to sell more than twenty thousand tickets. The French version of the Chronicles, translated by Steve Galluccio himself, premiered at Theâtre Jean Duceppe in Montreal in December 2014 and embarked in 2015 on a twenty-four-city tour.

Cast: 4 female, 3 male

What people say:

"After Galluccio's play Mambo Italiano became the most successful local English-language play from Montreal in almost half as century – and the most successful ever in the history of the Centaur Theatre – The St. Leonard Chronicles quickly became the second-most successful." — Montreal Gazette

"Full of crowd-pleasing, hyper-local jokes – mostly about Montreal's Italian communities, which encompass Galluccio's biggest fans. There are gags about awful homemade wine, family vacations to Wildwood on the Jersey Shore, and rivalries between neighbourhoods such as Little Italy and Ville Émard (which here gets insulted via a French scatological pun as 'Ville à Marde')." — The Globe and Mail

"The St. Leonard Chronicles were like a great antipasto in a family-run restaurant in Little Italy. There was laughter and plenty of it as the young, yuppie couple in the play tries to announce that they wish to leave the enclaves of Italian life in St. Leonard and move to (gasp!) Beaconsfield … scandal for spice and finally a few tears to leaven the mix." — RoverArts.com

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.