From the time you enter Vittoria, an Italian restaurant in New Town, you are greeted and accosted by a group of actors attempting to sound Italian. For the next two hours, they will sing, serve, and attempt to pry laughs from the audience all in the service of a great (if not cliched) text. The eighteenth century play of a Florentine inn keeper and her suitors / guests, gets plenty of laughs from the representations of class struggle, gender struggle, and character struggle. But the acting, save that of the lead portraying Mirandolina, is at times so over the top, that all focus on story and space is lost. If most of the cast were to eschew the grating Italian accents, the beauty of the text would have so much more resonance. Also, although some of them are decent singers, the inclusion of the top 40 of cliched italian songs (Thats Amore, O Solo Mio), just feels gratuitous and overbearing. At the start of the evening, I should have specified to the waitstaff that the cheese be on my meal, not in the performance.
