Reviews

Review: Mystic Pizza Comes With Lots of Tasty Toppings at Paper Mill Playhouse

The new jukebox musical delights with a zesty ’80s score and a stellar cast.

Cameron Kelsall

Cameron Kelsall

| New Jersey |

February 3, 2025

MYSTIC+PIZZA Riverside 1
Krystina Alabado as Daisy, Alaina Anderson as Kat, and Deánna Giulietti as JoJo in Mystic Pizza at the Riverside Theatre in Vero Beach, Florida
(© Jason Niedle)

Anyone in need of comfort food should head directly to Paper Mill Playhouse, where it’s being served up by the slice in Mystic Pizza. Set to a catalogue of 1980s pop classics, Sandy Rustin’s delicious adaptation of the beloved rom-com dances right off the stage and into your heart, touching your emotions as the familiar music embeds itself in your ears.

Many remember the source film as an early screen appearance for Julia Roberts, but the material, which Rustin renders faithfully, is more complex than the average movie romance. Set in a seaside Connecticut town populated largely by Portuguese Americans, the story follows the  Arujo sisters on their quests for love and self-actualization. Feisty Daisy (Krystina Alabado) and brainy Kat (Alaina Anderson) couldn’t be more different—one’s a whip-smart but unmotivated drifter, the other a Yale-bound overachiever—but their divergent personalities can’t eclipse their tight familial bond. Along with best friend JoJo (Deánna Giulietti), the girls sling tomato pies at the titular establishment under the watchful eye of mother-figure Leona (Jennifer Fouché).

In classic style, the narrative follows the trials and tribulations of the protagonists’ love lives. Daisy falls hard for the privileged Charles Gordon Windsor Jr. (Vincent Michael), only to wonder if his interest in her represents an act of rebellion against his snobbish family. The sheltered Kat begins a tentative flirtation with visiting architect Tim (Ben Fankhauser), which is complicated by the revelation that he’s married, however unhappily. And JoJo, afraid that marriage will get in the way of her goal to become a successful businesswoman, jilts her fisherman fiancé Bill (F. Michael Haynie) at the altar. When Leona announces her intention to sell Mystic Pizza and retire, personal and professional complications dovetail, setting the plot in motion.

Director Casey Hushion locates the human elements lurking beneath the fizzy plot. She draws surprisingly complex performances from the principal cast—the kind you rarely see in a jukebox musical where familiar tunes do most of the work in capturing the audience’s attention—showing how Daisy, Kat, and JoJo both chafe against and cleave to the culture that raised them. You immediately come to care for the characters and their struggles, such that some of the more clichéd aspects of the story, like a last-ditch effort to save the pizza shop by enticing a good review from a preening television food critic (played to the hilt by James Hindman), feel endearing rather than eye-rolling.

The company boasts voices for days, and the musical arrangements by Carmel Dean seamlessly adapt the well-known songs to a more traditional Broadway style. Anderson projects Kat’s quiet demeanor in book scenes, which makes for an appropriate jolt when she lets loose in her songs, projecting her character’s rich inner life beneath a placid exterior. Alabado demonstrates Daisy’s fierce countenance in a rousing rendition of Melissa Etheridge’s “I’m the Only One,” and she and the irresistibly charming Michael smolder with chemistry in a charged account of Pat Benatar’s “Hit Me With Your Best Shot.” Giulietti and Haynie make for cute comic relief throughout, and the big-voiced Fouché earned well-deserved whoops and cheers nearly every time she opened her mouth. John Mellencamp’s “Small Town” made for well-calibrated refrain throughout the show, giving voice to the Mystic residents’ pride in their seaside community.

The production makes effective use of Paper Mill’s large stage, with salty air practically radiating off Nate Bertone’s cedar-shake set pieces. Jen Caprio’s costumes immediately situate the viewer in the tight-skirted and high-haired world of the ’80s without going overboard, and Ryan J. O’Gara’s pastel lighting was charming without being cheesy. Kudos to sound designer Matt Kraus for turning up the volume just enough for the audience to rock out but not so much to lose the crisply articulated lyrics. Choreographer Connor Gallagher captures the movement of the era, and it feels impossible not to dance to the talented on-stage band, with its sexy synthesizers and rock saxophone.

In the show itself, the success of Mystic Pizza rests on the secret sauce: a blend of zesty spices and tangy tomato that sets Leona’s establishment apart from the other pie shops in town. Mystic Pizza the musical also seems to have a secret sauce that sets it apart from your average jukebox musical, with an overflow of talent onstage, a soundtrack of undeniable earworms, and a heart as big as the state of Connecticut. It’s advertised as “a slice of heaven,” and I couldn’t agree more.

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