Review: THE CALAMARI SISTERS' CLAM BAKE Boils Over With Hilarity!

Leave the kids at home! Abandon all sense of propriety! Embrace the risqué! Because the Calamari Sisters, Delphine and Carmella, are at the beach, dishing out hot plates of irreverent, edgy, and bawdy humor, all seasoned with equally hot saucy quips. As they note, without equivocation, this is nothing like a New England clambake ~ far from it. (They're kicking up a storm at the Herberger Theater Center in downtown Phoenix through January 21st.)

THE CALAMARI SISTERS' CLAM BAKE is a potpourri of over-the-top sketches that lampoon everything from the art of beachside cooking to fealty to the Church. It takes a while (about fifteen minutes of self-introductory song and dance that leverage the summertime hits of the past) for the Sisters to kick up a head of steam, but, once they do, the show is on permanent simmer. They bump, they grind, they swivel, they tease, they joke. It's like vaudeville stirred with burlesque on steroids!

The creation of Jay Falzone (Delphine), Stephen Smith (Carmella), and Dan Lavender, the show is laden with cooked-up Italian family tales at the end of which there's certain to be a punch line that will raise either a groan or a guffaw. Betwixt these and careful instructions on preparing the clams and requisite side dishes, the Sisters enjoin volunteers from the audience to partake in their shtick in what are the choice moments of the show. The "girls" are "masters" at ad lib as they skewer their guests with questions and use every answer as a launching pad for gambits of clever repartee. Falzone and Smith are masters at their craft, perfectly matched to complement each other and keep the stage alive with gags galore.

No one leaves the CLAMBAKE without a satisfied appetite and a wide grin etched on his or her face ~ and maybe a bit of guilt for laughing at the politically incorrect.

Photo credit to Lively Arts Productions

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