The wedding party dines at "Tony n' Tina's Wedding."
Photo by Kathryn Bender, Star-Bulletin

The premise is appetizing: the nups of Tony Nunzio and Valentina Velasco in a kind of free-form playlet that allows for improvisational stooging around. The audience is part of the festivities, which includes the wedding feast.

No kidding. Part of your $40 ticket goes for a pasta dinner, champagne and wedding cake.

Generally, stage food is designed to sit still and look good from a distance while causing minimum hassle for the actors. Since "Wedding" relies on the audience becoming part of the party, they need real food. Marian's Island Wide Catering is obliging with a nightly pasta primavera in a garlic butter sauce.

Director Ray Bumatai, who went to New York to observe the original production in action, said that the traditional barriers between audience and production have been removed. "There are no theater seats. It's round table and paper plates like a real wedding."

Why pasta primavera?

"A costume concern. A meat or red sauce would have been hard to clean. Marian's Catering food is actually a lot better than the food they were serving in New York! The audiences will like it. But the cast is going to be sick of pasta primavera after eating it every night for more than a month."

Mark and Hoku Gilbert play the bride and groom in "Tony and Tina's Wedding," running at Manoa Valley Theatre through July 21. Lance Rae plays the photographer.

This is likely to be the most popular and most unpopular show by any theater group this season. It is no exaggeration to say that it is unlike anything attempted here in recent years. The entire theater area is the set and the cast uses all of it - love it or hate it, you will be part of the show. It starts at least 30 minutes before the announced curtain time. And, no matter where you're seated you'll miss a lot of what goes on. For instance, when great uncle Luigi (Danny Lyman) starts reading his book maybe five people will catch even 50 percent of that joke; most won't notice it at all.

The play is a merciless satire of lower working class wedding receptions in the urban Northeast. MVT transplants it awkwardly to Hawaii in a way that suggests someone thought the script needed gratuitous pidiginizing to get local support. Bad idea.

Here's a vote for keeping the show true to its New York City origins.

The characters are all stock East Coast stereotypes. Gum chewing bride (Hoku Gilbert) and bridesmaids (Cathy Overstreet and Maria Luisa Winslow). Pregnant maid of honor (Suzanne Boyd). New Age priest who quotes Top 40 song lyrics like scripture (Bruce Hale). Dim-bulb groom (Mark Gilbert) and his dim-bulb hood buddies (Mark A. White, David Nuzzi and Lance Wheeler). Groom's lecherous widower father (Mark Goldstein). Dad's teenage stripper girlfriend (Shannon Winpenny). The bride's emotional widowed mother (Virginia Jones) and flamboyant brother (Andrew Sakaguchi). The photographer (Lance Rae) who dislikes the groom. A nun (Terri Madden) stricken with latent sensuality. A relentlessly generic singer (Wes Atmadja) and thoroughly annoying dance band.

The bride and bridesmaids, from top to bottom: Hoku Gilbert, Suzanne Boyd, Cathy Overstreet and Maria Luisa Winslow.

The wedding celebration degenerates into a series of unselfconsciously bad speeches, toasts, announcements and "very special" performances by friends and relatives of the bride and groom. Almost all of them come to blows with someone before it's over.

The caterer (Michael K. Paekekui) is the vehicle for most of the labored and tedious local material. The caterer's wife (Theresa Bondad) is a heavily stereotypical immigrant Filipina. Get there on time and you'll have no clue that the guy in jeans (Mark Lloyd) is Tina's ex.

What: Tony and Tina's Wedding
When: 7 p.m. Wednesdays through Saturdays and 4 p.m. Sundays through July 21
Where: Manoa Valley Theatre
Cost: $40, with dinner and a glass of champagne
Call: 988-6131