A few years ago, in the aftermath of a dinner party, married partners Jay Falzone and Stephen Smith, along with party host Dan Lavender, cooked up an idea that would become a runaway stage hit: “Cooking With the Calamari Sisters. ”
Well, actually they had a little help.
“The inception of it was alcohol,” Falzone said. “Stephen, my partner, and Dan Lavender, our writing partner, were working on another project. Dan had a dinner party and Stephen and I went. By the end of the night, we were the only ones left. We were going through aperitifs and going through ‘This goes with this dish.’ It led Dan to say, ‘I’ve always wanted to do a show about two Italian sisters cooking together. We just started talking and laughing about it because at that point we were drunk and talking about making the show happen and the concepts behind it and what it would be. Then we came back a week or two later and had a brainstorming session on the show itself. Then we wrote it. It was a really quick birthing process for the show.”
Falzone and Smith portray Delphine and Carmela Calamari, the darlings of Brooklyn’s cable-access TV station WFAT, which broadcasts their popular cooking show “Mangia Italiano.” Audience participation abounds while the sisters sing and dance to their favorite Italian tunes.
Soon after the show opened, it caught on with audiences, much to the amazement of the creators.
“We thought it would be a cute little niche show,” Falzone said. “It would be good, but it would have a cult following. We couldn’t have been more surprised at how wrong we were. We opened in Rochester in late 2009 and it ran sold-out for almost a year. The first three weeks was a lighter audience but when word spread, we had a waiting list. Our audience is very interesting because a lot of them are people who had never gone to see theater before. We had a large TV audience, which is fitting because the concept for the show is that it’s a TV cooking show.”
When it came to inspiration, Falzone said all he and Smith had to do was dig into their backgrounds.
“We were doing this as a love letter to our Italian upbringing but anyone can relate to it,” he said. “We thought we’d aim it towards offbeat theater people and the lesbian and gay community but it ended up being a lot more universal than that. It just widened the appeal.”
Falzone added that Delphine is his grandmother’s namesake.
“My grandmother was a caterer for 35 years in real life,” he said. “The only reason she became a caterer was because the first catering job she did was for my mother’s wedding for 450 people. She just couldn’t find a caterer that she was happy with, so she said she’d do it herself. After my mother’s wedding, people came up to her asking her to do their sons’ and daughters’ weddings. So she became one of the busiest caterers in Corning, N.Y., for 35 years. Dan and I both have strong Italian upbringings. So the inspirations come from all over.”
Apparently there was enough inspiration for the Calamari Sisters to branch out into different themed shows, like “Christmas with the Calamari Sisters” and “The Calamari Sisters’ Big Fat Italian Wedding.”
Falzone said the newer Calamari shows came from audiences wanting to know more about the titular characters.
“People started asking, ‘What’s next?’ “For ‘Christmas with the Calamari Sisters,’ it seemed like the natural next step. We thought it would just be the two shows. With some of the plot lines we set up in ‘Christmas,’ people kept asking, ‘What’s next? What’s going to happen after this?’ People wanted to know more about these girls. That’s a very neat part of the show. The two characters have been created in a thorough, complex way that people want to hang out with them. The audience would love to be friends with Delphine and Carmella. It’s very nice. We have people who saw the show 10 times.”
“Cooking with the Calamari Sisters” runs through Nov. 4 at Society Hill Playhouse, 507 S. Eighth St. For more information or tickets, call 215-923-0210 or visit www.thecalamarisisters.com.