Off-Broadway Actress Candice Guardino & Her Husband Face Lawsuit for ITALIAN BRED L.A. Run

The New York Post reports that off-Broadway actress Candice Guardino and her husband Thomas Felicciardi are being sued by investors Joe Cecala, Emily Conner and Lawrence Schwartz. The trio claim that the couple took their $68,000 investment for their proposed revival of 'Italian Bred' and ran off to Los Angeles, where they used the funds for a "luxury lifestyle on the West Coast."

While the couple did use some of the money to stage the show, a spoof on Guardino's New York Italian upbringing, at LA's St. Luke's Theater, the production was a financial failure. The lawsuit claims they went on to spend the remaining money on such luxuries as an apartment, car rentals, spa outings, clothing and a publicist.

Explained Richard Roth, the plaintifffs' attorney, "It's a show about Italians in New York, so it obviously would've done better in New York. They basically had my clients fund their move to Los Angeles."

Cecala also shared that the investors had an agreement with the couple that the show would reopen at New York's Clurman Theater later this year, but that the duo "snuck off" and took the show to The Hudson Theatre in LA, where "it got destroyed", in part due to the couple's comping more than 50 percent of the audience. Said the investor, "I saw the receipts, and they netted only $1,500. It's a joke because I could have packed the place for them [at the Clurman]."

In the suit, the couple is accused of racketeering, securities fraud, falsifying receipts and other documents to "hide an intentional misappropriation of funds." The investors want to be reimbursed for their $68,000 initial investment, in addition to more than $200,000 in punitive damages.

In ITALIAN BRED, Candice Guardino slips in and out of characters from her own family as she cooks up a full meal of growing up Italian on Staten Island. Having kept a personal record of everything that was uttered by her loving and outspoken grandmother, Candice combines Grandma Fran's unfiltered words of wisdom along with a generous helping of her own experiences.

Both Guardino and Felicciardi refused to comment.