I confess to being an easy laugh. I love comedy and I particularly love comedy in the theatre. In Piazza San Domenico by Steve Galluccio was not that funny. Michel Perron in a mustard yellow fifties suit, and a black wig was the most comic event in the play. The set and the costumes were terrific, but the play failed to deliver.

At the heart of every great comedy there is some truth or wisdom imparted. Commedia del arte is about debunking the hierarchical order of society. Comedy is “The effort to maintain one’s dignity against insurmountable odds.” None of these were evident when Perron as the hero’s wing man was about to mount the ingénue in the middle of the piazza. It seemed like an event from a different play.

When Carmelina, played convincingly by Christina Broccolini, faints at the start of the two-act play, most of the women in the audience already know what the problem is. But we had to sit through the breakup with fiancé Guido (played energetically by Guido Cocomello), the revenge and cuckolding of everyone by everyone and an earthquake. Predictably the wife of Tonino (Perron) almost cheats on her husband and says: “Just before the earth finally moved for me – the earth had to go and actually move.” I paraphrase, but there was not one line that I could remember when it was over. If “music is the food of love” we were served over cooked pasta and empty calories.

The dignity and more nuanced performances of Ellen David as Isabella, the mother of the knocked up ingénue, and the refreshing performance of Vittorio Rossi as Pasquale the seller of fresh figs, gave the piece some very delicate and worthwhile moments. Mara Lalli was a convincing bad girl and Carl Alacchi was over the top as the cross eyed suitor of Carmelina the ingénue. The lines were plastered on with a trowel and if comedy is all about timing, this play went on way too long.

Galluccio has talent but this is a play that needed a lighter touch and better dialogue, and really tight timing. Comedy from the time of the Greeks right through Commedia del Arte and modern ROM COMS is about sex and the boy finally getting the girl or vice versa, but it also needs to be based on solid characters slipping on believable banana peels. That is why it was possible to buy Isabella and Pasquale and almost impossible to believe the shtick of Marisa, a kvetch of Olympic stature. The most hilarious thing about Jocelyne Zucco’s performance as the would be adulteress was the girdle she wore under her bathrobe.

There was little amusing about the fifties for those who remember them, and anyone who tries to romanticize that decade and tries to make us laugh about it had better be really funny.

In Piazza San Domenico runs at Centaur Theatre through November 1. See
Box Office 514 288 3161 for details.