"Miracle at Naples"
Written by David Grimm; directed by Peter Dubois; scenic design by Alexander Dodge; costume design by Anita Yavich; lighting design by Rui Rita; sound design by Ben Emerson; original music by Peter Golub
Cast in order of appearance:
Flaminia, Christina Pumariega; Francescina, Alma Cuervo; Don Bertolino Fortunato, Dick Latessa; La Piccola, Lucy DeVito; Tristano, Pedro Pascal; Matteo, Gregory Wooddell; Giancarlo, Alfredo Narciso; Ensemble, Paul Cereghino, Sam Kikes, Rebecca Newman, Jessica Uher
Performances: Now through May 9, Huntington Theatre Company, Wimberly Theatre, Calderwood Pavilion, Boston Center for the Arts, 527 Tremont Street, Boston
Tickets: Box Office at 617-266-0800 or www.huntingtontheatre.org
Playwright David Grimm apparently went to the George Carlin School of Comedy. 
Repeat the seven words that can't be said on television often enough and people might start to think they're funny.
Not.
Grimm's new play, Miracle at Naples, receiving its world premiere at the Huntington Theatre Company's Wimberly stage at the Boston Center for the Arts now through May 9, is an offensive, boring, self-indulgent waste of perfectly talented actors, all stridently punctuating every other - no, make that every - sentence with crude swears and even cruder epithets. In an attempt to be oh, so smart and oh, so clever, Grimm substitutes crassness for wit, unsuccessfully cloaking his tasteless bathroom humor beneath the brazen mask of commedia dell'arte.
Set in Naples circa 1580, Miracle aspires to create a cockeyed comic tribute to our eternal search for love and companionship by crashing together the contradictions between sex and romance, cynicism and faith, cunning and innocence, and street theater and vaulted poetry. It's an interesting premise, revealing the simple goodness that lies in the middle ground between saints and sinners, but Grimm's non-stop barrage of unfunny juvenile slapstick leaves such an acrid taste in the mouth that it's impossible to savor the few sweet, redeeming moments that are available.
Hairspray's Tony Award-winning Dick Latessa leads a band of bawdy and malcontent traveling players who arrive in Naples on the day the city's annual miracle is due to occur. 
Hungry for food and desperate for money, the actors are nevertheless forbidden to perform until the dried blood of beheaded patron saint Gennaro liquefies in its ampoule. Citizens fear that the troupe's lewd and lascivious behavior will anger the saint and prevent him from once again bestowing good fortune on the city and granting the wishes of the faithful. With time on their hands and food and sex on their minds, the actors set in motion a chain of hedonistic events that could easily make a sailor blush.
As the company's founder and director, Don Bertolino Fortunato, Latessa does his best to reveal the world-weary and lonely actor beneath the selfish, hard-baked crust. He is a man who has almost outlived his usefulness, painfully aware that his improvisational art form is beginning to give way to more refined and less accessible scripted plays. But he is also a pleasure-seeking egoist who hurls rude insults at his daughter, his nephew, his late wife, and the local nurse/guardian who becomes his volatile paramour even as she castigates her young charge for dallying with two troupe members - at the same time. For the most part Latessa wrestles with Grimm's prurient excesses and wins, but even he, usually a master of the off-hand delivery, seems crushed at times from the weight of too many forced expletives.
