NEPA Scene Staff

Comedian Sebastian Maniscalco brings Stay Hungry Tour to Sands Bethlehem Event Center on March 2

Comedian Sebastian Maniscalco brings Stay Hungry Tour to Sands Bethlehem Event Center on March 2
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From a press release:

After a string of successful shows on his Stay Hungry Tour, including five sold-out nights at New York’s iconic Radio City Music Hall and two at the F.M. Kirby Center in Wilkes-Barre, it was announced today that comedian, actor, and bestselling author Sebastian Maniscalco will bring the next leg of this tour to the Sands Bethlehem Event Center on Saturday, March 2, 2019 at 8 p.m.

Tickets, which are $49.50, $59.50, and $79.50, plus applicable fees, go on sale this Friday, Oct. 19 at 10 a.m. and can be purchased at sandseventcenter.com, the Event Center box office (77 Sands Blvd., Bethlehem), ticketmaster.com and all Ticketmaster outlets, or by phone at 800-745-3000. A pre-sale for members of the venue’s Music Insiders Club will take place on Thursday, Oct. 18 at 10 a.m. through 10 p.m.

Let’s face it – in our increasingly tepid, polite, and politically correct culture, we need more people like Sebastian Maniscalco. Forever able to seize the moment, never failing to speak his mind, always telling it like it is, this is one man who isn’t afraid to put it all out there.

Yes, the Chicago-area born, Italian-immigrant-raised comedian behind wildly successful network specials, including last year’s “Why Would You Do That?” “What’s Wrong with People?,” and “Aren’t You Embarrassed?,” is that little voice within all our heads – the one we are too timid to unleash. Maniscalco is bearing the burden of our bizarre and head-scratching modern-day world. You can thank him later.

Make no mistake – Maniscalco’s is a meticulous, hard-won comedic point of view.

“Every night you’re getting up there and doing something new,” says the comedian, who now has hordes of fans pouring into venues across North America to witness his outsize, highly physical brand of comedy. That’s when he’s not appearing on Jerry Seinfeld’s “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee” or making return visits to late-night shows like “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon,” “Late Night with Seth Meyers,” and “Conan.”

“It’s just working out a muscle, man,” he says of maintaining his comedic chops. “You don’t become a bodybuilder the first day you start lifting weights. You gotta work each muscle. Same thing with comedy. You gotta flesh out your joke, your bit. You add and subtract. You see what works.”

Distinguished by the New York Times as having his “own kind of panache,” Maniscalco is a success story resulting from years of hard work and a keen self-awareness of innate talent. A natural born storyteller, one constantly regaling his family with madcap tales at the dinner table, he moved to Los Angeles in 1998 and began pounding the pavement on his comedic quest. The tireless worker first made his name at the city’s famed Comedy Store, where he performed at every opportunity – even if that meant rushing over to the club on a break from his waiter job at the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills. “I felt if I missed an opportunity to be on stage, I missed an opportunity to somebody being in the audience and seeing me.”

His persistence paid off – then-massive comic Andrew Dice Clay saw him onstage one night and took a young Maniscalco out on the road with him. But not until Vince Vaughan enlisted him for his popular “Wild West Comedy Show” did his career begin to explode. “From there, things started to snowball,” Maniscalco recalls.

That’s quite the understatement. Maniscalco now sits as one of the premier stand-up comedians, and a multi-faceted one at that. Following a massive stand-up tour of theaters last year, the coming months are monumental ones for the 2016 Just for Laughs Stand Up Comedian of the Year. In addition to starring in his own wildly popular SiriusXM program, “The Pete and Sebastian Show,” his major motion picture portfolio has expanded to include a voice-over for character Johnny the Groundhog in the animated feature “Nut Job 2” and a role in the New Line feature comedy “The House” starring Will Ferrell and Amy Poehler, along with a role in “Tag” starring alongside Ed Helms, Jeremy Renner, and Jon Hamm. Next, he’ll appear in “Green Book” with Oscar-winner Mahershala Ali, Linda Cardellini, and Viggo Mortensen, set for release on Nov. 21, and in 2019, Maniscalco will join a star-studded cast that includes Robert DeNiro, Al Pacino, Joe Pesci and more in Martin Scorsese’s Netflix film “The Irishman,” which has a Northeastern Pennsylvania connection.

Maniscalco was included on Forbes’ 2017 list of “The World’s Highest Paid Comedians,” where they praised, “thanks to his enthusiasm and willingness to work, Maniscalco will likely continue to be on Forbes’ list for years to come.” Dubbed “one of the hottest comics” by Newsday and “one of the funniest comics working stand-up today” by Esquire, his live performance has become a critically-acclaimed event, with the Los Angeles Times raving, “onstage, there’s an impatience to Maniscalco’s delivery as well, a hair-trigger exasperation with people and modern life, punctuated with baffled expressions, percussive thumps on the microphone, and wide-swung leg kicks more associated with an Olympic speed-skater than a stand-up comic.”

Throughout 2018, he toured North America on his Stay Hungry Tour, named after his inspiring, uproarious collection of essays that hit shelves on Feb. 27 from publisher Simon & Schuster (Gallery Books).

Still, for Maniscalco, the work continues. “There’s a voice always in the back of my head saying, ‘Don’t rest!’”