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By Andrea Peterson
Staff Reporter of the Wall Street Journal
The bride wore white. The families feuded. Everyone danced
the Macarena.
But this wasn't a typical wedding. The "guests"
at the Orlando, Fla., ceremony were 500 Sony salespeople gathered
for an annual meeting.
Forget comedy nights and boring banquets: the newest corporate
party is a customized version of "Tony 'n' Tina's Wedding,"
an offbeat show where audience members find themselves playing
guests ala a boisterous wedding, complete with dinner and
dances with the wedding party. After almost 20 years off-Broadway,
the show is taking its schtick to the boardroom, offering
to liven up meetings for about $25,000.
"It was kind of a raucous, wild, slightly out-of-control
evening," says Mario Giampaglia, director of Sony's in-house
production group.
While the essence of the show remained the same -- gum cracking
bridesmaids with big hair, shady ushers and family spats --
"Tony 'n' Tina's producers and Sony organizers collaborated
to make the show truly Sony's. While the original show starts
with the ceremony, Sony's began when the wedding party crashed
the company banquet, on the
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premise that the hotel had double booked the room After
a few moments of yelling and arm-waving, a Sony senior vice
president, Anthony Piazza, "recognized" the groom's
father from his old neighborhood and invited the wedding party
to share the room. Executives made toasts to the couple, a
jovial priest blessed a table of senior management, and everyone
got a slice of cake.
When Bear Stearns hired the show for a meeting in Miami last
month, the cast dragged unsuspecting employees off buses and
into a church. "We got greeted by these crazy people,"
says Warren Spector, a Bear Stearns executive vice president.
"We had no idea what was going on." One managing
director was so caught up in the fun that he proposed to his
real life girl friend during the reception.
Still not all of the show's bawdy antics made it in the corporate
world. Sony canceled the striptease done by the tarty girlfriend
of the groom's father. And the drug-dealer best man became
a crook selling stolen Sony Electronics.
While the show will keep doing company meetings,the producers
now are eyeing another market -- merging companies. Says producer
Joe Corcoran, "Marriage is the ultimate merger."
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