THE CARBONIZATTO STORY

Pizza is a big deal in New Haven. We’re the Pizza Capital of America, after all.

A Broken Umbrella Theatre has always wanted to tell the New Haven Apizza story, but not as a biography of any pizzaioli, but as a story of all of them.

To do that, we took New Haven’s Apizza people and joined them into the fictionalized Carbonizzatto Family. Carbonizzatto, from the Italian for “carbonized” — a knowing wink to the black-dusted fingers walking out of any apizza shop.

In A Slice, we see multiple generations of the Carbonizzattos throughout history, but always in New Haven and always at their pizza shop. The Carbonizattos struggle from generation to generation as they grapple with what they owe to future Carbonizattos — and what do they owe to those who came before?

Because this is part of a larger story, and it’s not just about Apizza, it’s about a family. A Slice is only the seed for our full production in 2025 of Apizza: New Haven’s Family Business, or as Bruno Cantante sings in the show, “One slice don’t make a pie.”