Home / Events / Sweet 16
Parents book it. The teenager decides whether it was any good. Both of those are our problem, and most of the work that settles it happens weeks before the doors open.
Weddings are the bulk of what we do. Eighteen years, 500+ of them. Sweet 16s are a smaller part of the book: eight booked or completed, running from 2021 out to dates already on the calendar for 2028. That is the number. We are not going to dress it up as hundreds.
Every one of those eight was in a room with a name on it — LiGreci's Staaten twice, then the Crystal Room, Ruby Falls, Blue Pearl, Grand Plaza and the Hilton Garden Inn here on Staten Island, plus Yesterday's over in Hazlet. None of them were backyard or at-home parties. If that is what you are planning, we can quote it, but we would be learning your space on the day rather than drawing on experience, and you should know that before you hire anyone.
What we have learned in those rooms is mostly about structure. A Sweet 16 is not a wedding with younger guests. It is an MC-heavy event with two separate audiences sitting in the same room, and the parts that go wrong are almost never the dance floor.
The guest of honour's friends are the dance floor. They arrive ready, they stay out there, and they will not politely wait through a long formal stretch. The adults — parents, aunts, grandparents, family friends — are an audience. They are seated, they are watching, and they are the ones who will tell you afterwards whether the night felt organised.
Those two groups want different music and different pacing, and the job is to serve both without embarrassing either. That means the teenager's list runs the floor for most of the night, with adult sets placed where they do some good: during dinner service, immediately after the formalities, and in the last twenty minutes when the younger guests have burned themselves out.
It also means reading when a song is clearing the floor rather than filling it, and changing course without an announcement about it. We would rather be useful than impressive. Nobody needs a DJ performing at them.
Sixteen candles, sixteen groups of people, each with a name, a relationship and a reason. This is the single moment most likely to fall apart, and it falls apart for one reason: the MC is improvising. Names get mispronounced. The order drifts. There is no song cue, so people walk up in silence. By candle nine the room has stopped paying attention and the family at the front can feel it.
We build the list on paper before the event. Every candle gets a number, the names of who is coming up, the relationship as the guest of honour wants it described, and a phonetic spelling for anything we could get wrong. Each candle gets its own song bed, cut to twenty or thirty seconds and faded on a cue, not on a guess. Sixteen candles done properly runs roughly ten to twelve minutes. Push past fifteen and you lose the room.
Plan for someone not being there. On a ceremony with sixteen slots, somebody is late, somebody stepped outside, somebody is in the bathroom. We reorder live and keep moving — no "is Aunt so-and-so here?" into a live microphone, no dead air while a teenager stands at the front of the room waiting.
The grand entrance happens once. You do not get a second take, so it gets walked before guests arrive: where she enters from, which doors are being held and by whom, what the lighting is doing, what the song is and exactly where the drop lands relative to her hitting the floor. Entrance geometry is different in every one of these rooms. The Staaten does not behave like Ruby Falls, and Yesterday's does not behave like either.
Court introductions need the same treatment as the candles — names, pairs, order, pronunciation, written down. If the court has rehearsed something, we need to know what, and we need the music edited to the length they actually practised to.
We also walk the load-in and sort the sound before anyone sees the room. Ceiling height, hard surfaces and where the bar sits all change how loud the formalities need to be for the back tables to hear the names clearly. If the venue requires us to run through a house system, we will tell you that during planning rather than discovering it at four o'clock.
One more thing worth asking out loud: does she actually want the father-daughter dance? Some do. Some are mortified by it. If it is happening, the edit matters — a full four-minute record is a long time in front of a floor of fifteen-year-olds. Two minutes, cleanly faded, lands better than the whole song.
This is a genuine problem and it is better settled in planning than at the booth. A lot of the music a sixteen-year-old wants is explicit, and "clean" versions vary. Some are decent edits. Some are so cut up they are worse than not playing the track. Some do not exist at all.
So we settle the rule in advance, in writing, with whoever is paying: clean versions only all night, clean through dinner and the formalities with some latitude once the older guests have thinned out, or no restriction at all. Whatever you choose, we hold it at the booth when a group of teenagers comes over mid-set to ask for the explicit one, because that request is coming.
The do-not-play list matters more than the play list. Give us the songs that are off the table — an ex, a track tied to a falling-out, something tied to a family loss — and we will keep them off. We also want one named point of contact for requests on the night, usually the guest of honour or one friend she trusts. Without that, thirty phones become thirty DJs.
Sweet 16s are quoted per event rather than sold from a fixed starting price — a sixty-guest party in a restaurant room and a three-hundred-guest night in a ballroom are genuinely different jobs, and one number would mislead you in one direction or the other. The planning work described above — candle running order, pronunciation sheet, timed song cues, entrance walkthrough, do-not-play list — is how we run a Sweet 16, not an upsell. What the final number comes to depends on the room, the hours and anything you want beyond the DJ and MC work. Ask and we will give you a number rather than a package name.
We are Staten Island based and we work across New York and New Jersey. Travelling jobs are normal for us — Hazlet was one. If your venue is further out, say where and we will tell you honestly whether it is worth your money to bring us rather than hire local.
The DJ you meet is the DJ who works your event. There is no roster, no "one of our team" on the night. If we are booked on your date, we will say so instead of handing it off, and if what you want is something other than what is described on this page, that isn't us, and there are good ones who are.
We run it. The MC work is the main part of a Sweet 16, not an add-on. Before the date we build the full running order with you — all sixteen candles, who comes up for each, how the relationship should be described, phonetic spellings for any name we could get wrong, and a song cue per candle. On the night it runs off that sheet, and we reorder live if someone isn't in the room.
Eight booked or completed, with dates ranging from 2021 through to 2028. Our main business is weddings — 500+ over eighteen years. We would rather give you the real figure than imply a longer history. All eight were at named venues: LiGreci's Staaten (twice), the Crystal Room, Ruby Falls, Blue Pearl, Grand Plaza, the Hilton Garden Inn on Staten Island, and Yesterday's in Hazlet.
Yes, and we will ask you to decide the rule before the date so there is no argument about it later. The options are clean versions all night, clean through dinner and the formalities with some latitude afterwards, or no restriction. Be aware that for a handful of tracks the clean edit is poor or doesn't exist, and we will flag those during planning rather than surprising you with them.
On a sixteen-candle ceremony, someone is usually missing when their number comes round. We skip and come back without announcing it, so nobody is left standing at the front of the room in silence and the ceremony keeps its pace. That only works because the order is written down in advance rather than being read off a napkin.
Yes to both. We are Staten Island based and work across NY and NJ — Yesterday's in Hazlet is one of the rooms we have done. And the DJ you meet at the consultation is the DJ on the microphone on the night. If we are already booked on your date, we will tell you that straight away.
“Quality, professionalism and most importantly fun.”
Nick & Allison McAleerSend the date, the venue and roughly how many guests, and we will tell you whether we are free and what it costs — enquiries get a real answer, not a brochure.
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