STEFANIA LICARI: I CAN MAKE YOU ITALIAN IN 55 MINUTES
Underbelly Boulevard
★★½
“Licari is warm, personable and holds the stage with a gentle confidence”
Italian stand-up comedian Stefania Licari has earned a reputation for sell out shows at the last two Edinburgh Festival Fringes, and her performance at Underbelly Boulevard Soho, London, also drew a healthy crowd. Across just under an hour, I Can Make You Italian in 55 minutes finds Licari setting herself the ambitious task of teaching the audience how to be “more Italian,” guiding us through a sequence of comic routines that perhaps inevitably vary in sharpness and impact. Nonetheless, written and performed by Licari, it’s a playful premise delivered with charm and generosity.
The audience is eased into the atmosphere before the show even begins, with Italian themed music and a red and green lighting state complementing the white of the main wash to evoke the sounds and colours of Italy. Licari emerges onto a sparse stage and leads us through a series of cultural contrasts, particularly around social habits and the quirks of male behaviour. Some observations land well such as the British affection for jacket potatoes versus the more refined Italian palate, or the gentle ribbing of British culinary missteps with pasta.
A ‘volunteer’ from the audience, who felt like a pre-organised stooge, is brought up as a kind of comic foil to be taught how to walk and gesture “like an Italian.” It’s an engaging idea, though one that never quite develops into a fully realised set piece.
Licari draws on her own lived experience as an expat medic turned comic throughout the performance, but the transitions between stories sometimes feel abrupt; a leap from personal anecdote to a riff on Cinderella, the transitions seem merely functional. Each piece does not really feed strongly enough into the next, and that leads to a disjointedness that might be addressed as the piece develops.
Themes of love, identity and family surface throughout, yet the sudden revelation about her mother’s cancer – delivered under stark white light – felt somewhat shoehorned into the structure rather than organically earned. The thread of female empowerment is also present throughout, but the narrative strands fail to interlock with enough clarity or momentum to give the show a truly satisfying arc.
Stefani Licari is warm, personable and holds the stage with a gentle confidence. As a performer, she is softer in tone than the bold, brash persona the premise implies, but the material doesn’t always support her, and the overall energy in this performance felt lower than it needed to be. With stronger dramaturgy and more deliberate shaping of the narrative, the show could gain more cohesion and drive. As it stands, the writing feels, as Italians might put it, a little too staccato.
STEFANIA LICARI: I CAN MAKE YOU ITALIAN IN 55 MINUTES
Underbelly Boulevard
Reviewed on 24th September 2026
by Robert West
