Lidia Bastianich Book Signing Dinner at Lidia’s; Reduced Shakespeare Co. at the O’Reilly (Tues., 6/26/18)

The namesake of Lidia’s Pittsburgh, Lidia Bastianich, and executive chef, Daniel Walker.

1) Lidia’s Pittsburgh welcomes back their namesake, Emmy-award winning TV host, chef and author, Lidia Bastianich, today in celebration of the launch of her new memoir My American Dream:  A Life of Love, Family, and Food. The book was released by Knopf Publishing in April. Lidia will be greeting guests at the restaurant throughout the night, telling stories from her life, and signing copies of her new book.

Lidia’s Executive Chef Daniel Walker will offer a special three course menu for the event. The menu for the celebration will include antipasti selections served family style, choice of entree including pasta, grouper, osso bucco, lamb, and lemon chicken,  Two of the dessert selections are chocolate ricotta cheesecake and berry tiramisu. Kids selections are also offered so you can bring the whole family. For reservations or more information visit Lidia’s Pittsburgh or call (412) 552-0150. 1400 Smallman St., Strip District.

3) It’s high-speed parody season in Pittsburgh. Having barely caught our breath after recent touring companies gave us super-condensed spoofs of “Game of Thrones” and the Harry Potter books, we now must gird our proverbial loins for the granddaddies of all such comical condensers, the Reduced Shakespeare Company. The show is RSC’s latest, William Shakespeare’s Long Lost First Play (Abridged). It premiered in the theater at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. in 2016, and the video above—made for that premiere—will give you a brief intro. (Don’t have 3½ minutes? All right: The Long Lost First Play is a hypothetical mashup of mixed-up first drafts of plays that Shakespeare really wrote later. E.g., Prince Hamlet meets Lady Macbeth, etc.) The Reduced Shakespeare act can look merely silly when glimpsed in small doses. But the guys are excellent actors, and the longer you watch, the funnier they get. They’re in town for a month-long run so you can even catch ‘em twice. Performance continue through July 1. At the O’Reilly Theatre, 621 Penn Ave., Cultural District. (MV)

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