BILLED AS AN EVENING of storytelling, noshing and cocktails, June 19 marked the celebratory announcement of the Off-Broadway show If You Can’t Join ’Em, Serve ’Em. It also marked the playwriting debut of Mary Giuliani, coowner (with wholesale jerseys husband Ryan Giuliani) of Mary Giuliani Catering & Events.
That Giuliani went from planning parties to stagecraft (she’ll be performing the one-woman show, too) is no great leap. She pursued an acting career fresh out of college; it culminated in wholesale nba jerseys one line as a Pakistani terrorist in an Off- Off-Broadway show. So Giuliani changed gears and started planning events for nonprofits, later working for a caterer. “It’s where I got my PhD in parties,” she says. “Every event was like a mini theatrical performance.”
Her aptitude for crafting delightful and festive occasions can be traced to her Long Island foodie family. “My grandmother owned one of the first oceanfront hotels in Montauk,” says Giuliani. “I grew up in the hospitality world.”
family’s Montauk summer home was, then, the perfect setting for a preview of her play, a reinvention of dinner theater. Written by Giuliani and Joanna Adler, the script grew out of cheap jerseys a book proposal Giuliani had been Summer putting together in which she described her party-planning highs and lows. “I realized all Mary these stories for each chapter would work together as a one-woman show,” she nós says. Even better, she was inspired to include food in the performance: As she recounts each scenario, servers (who also act as characters) circulate with the hors d’oeuvres and drinks she’s describing. In one story, for example, she caters a party for a fancy divorcée and serves all the hors d’oeuvres in half—“because she got half.” The audience, of course, Hamptons: will be served the same semi-bites, as well as the “O-tini” she created for a very special—and APPSA elusive—party guest.
At the pre-play party in June (the show is scheduled to debut this fall at Chelsea Market), Giuliani did a 15-minute reading; food and drink referenced in the play cheap nba jerseys were on hand, including mini lobster rolls as a nod to her grandmother’s Montauk mixers, s’mores and appetizers on a Ferris Winner’s wheel. (Fabio Arruda, creative director of Mary Giuliani Catering & Events, was responsible for the wheel and designed the evening’s event.) “So much of what we do is chic but down-home and approachable,” she says. “It gives people a sense they can take their shoes off.” And, it seems, to get in on wholesale mlb jerseys the act.
Read more at http://hamptons-magazine.com/personalities/articles/theater-dinner#SH3KsjCykScf8sfH.99
