Every time Gina Musumeci marries her fiancé Sam Masotto, she cries. And they get married a lot, nearly every night.

As the stars of the play Tony n' Tina's Wedding, the real-life lovers have gotten much practice for their own wedding in February. The show went up yesterday and runs through Sunday with seven performances at the Capitol Center for the Arts.

"Every time Gina is Tina, she cries when we get to the ceremony scene," Masotto said chuckling. Musumeci took his teasing in stride and agreed.

"I haven't been able to get through it without sobbing yet," she said. "It's very real for us."

The show, which has been running off-Broadway since 1988, invites audiences to the wedding of Tony and Tina, a young Italian couple with a big love and an outrageous family. As guests, audience members are treated to dinner, dancing, champagne and the semi-improvised shenanigans that come with any family gathering worth its salt.

"Throughout the night you start to get people's back stories, like who slept with who, and who's the drug dealer," Musumeci said. "Like any wedding."

As for their own back story, the couple met in college in Musumeci's native New Jersey, where Masotto had relocated. They met at a party, where they spent the night chatting each other up. But that's not how their romance began exactly.

"At the end of the night, she said 'okay, well, see ya,'" Masotto said. "I told her I would look for her next semester. I didn't say that was the girl I am going to marry at the time, but I knew this was the girl I definitely wanted to date. . . . The next semester I saw her in a hallway, and said, 'Hey Gina! And she's like 'Hey, you.' She had no idea what my name was."

After a re-introduction, the two were inseparable. Since meeting, they've done several acting projects together and even worked in the same restaurant in New York City to help make ends meet

as the two climbed the acting ladder. Masotto said that over the years his family had encouraged him to audition for Tony n' Tina's Wedding, given his Italian heritage.

But it wasn't until about a year and a half ago, when Masotto saw an ad in an acting trade magazine, that he decided to audition. He read with several other women, but finally the production team asked him if he had a girlfriend. When he told them about Musumeci, they asked her to come in.

"I had never even thought about auditioning for Tina because they had a height requirement," Musumeci said. "I'm really short. I'm only 5'2. He always says I look like a little cupcake. And that's true. So I never really even thought about it."

Eventually, the couple was cast for the touring company for the show.

And since then, their lives have been eerily imitating art.

"Our engagement was definitely a Tony and Tina engagement." Masotto said. "Nothing went like it was supposed to."

Masotto said that he planned the night out so that the two would sit at the same table, at the same restaurant on the same night they had their first date. But what he had hoped was to get her parents' blessings before he asked her to marry him.

"Her parents are homebodies," he said. "They are always home. But wouldn't you know, that night, when I went to call, they weren't home."

After several frantic attempts to reach them, Masotto got down on one knee and said, " 'This didn't go how I wanted it to, but, you wanna get married,' " Musumeci said. "And I started crying, of course, and then I called him a big jerk."

He took that as a yes, he said.

The rest of the evening was spent fielding calls from Musumeci's family, who after receiving all Masotto's desperate attempts to reach them, had thought they were in a ditch somewhere.

Now in their first year of the show and with their own wedding to look forward to, Musumeci and Masotto said they couldn't imagine it any other way.

"We're almost like the Stillers, just a little more hepped up," Masotto said, referring to the classic comedy team of Jerry Stiller and his wife Anne Meara. "I couldn't imagine doing this with another Tina. I would try, but I think it would be really, really hard to kiss someone who wasn't Gina. . . We bring that element of reality to the show because we are 100 percent, so much in love with each other. It's kind of mushy, I know, but it's true." (next page »)