Review: A Bronx Tale

Chazz Palminteri is a formidable talent, not just as a writer and actor, but as a self-promoter. His well-deserved success is the result of hard work and determination. And it all started 20 years ago with A Bronx Tale, Palminteri's one-man semi-autobiographical show about growing up amongst neighborhood hoods.

Three cheers (but not the Bronx kind) for Palminteri: the writer, actor and self-promoter. A Bronx Tale, now playing at the Ellie Caulkins Opera House, has aged well because it taps into universal themes, is presented in a unique style, and stars the guy who lived it. It has qualities of both a morality tale and a memory play.

Palminteri narrates and plays himself at age nine and as a teenager, but also plays a variety of neighborhood friends and felons. Most of the gangsters are Runyonesque, with distinctive and frequently hilarious disabilities and mannerisms.

After witnessing a murder and lying to police about the culprit, young "C" finds himself with two dads: his strict, hard-working and essentially moral biological father, and a loyal, affectionate, wise yet ruthless and violent neighborhood don. Torn between these two opposites, the impressionable youth walks a tightrope of moral ambiguity until circumstances force him to make a decision on how he'll live his life.

There are some really great ideas here, about what happens when you do a good thing for a bad person, about whether the working man is a chump or a champion, and how through love, a bad person can bring out the best in another.

Palminteri commands the stage for 90 minutes with no intermission, making smooth transitions between characters, maintaining the narrative thread, and building suspense to an explosive conclusion. This is a great story, told by a terrific storyteller.

And he knows it! In all of the advertising and promotional materials, Palminteri makes it clear that this is his project through and through. He's got a good thing going and he makes the most of it. After seeing A Bronx Tale, it's easy to see where this quality came from. He's got a bit of both father figures in him. There's both attraction and revulsion, heroism and villainy in all of this, but most of all it's dramatic, and that's what makes for an outstanding evening of theatre.

A Bronx Tale plays at the Ellie Caulkins Opera House in the Denver Performing Arts Complex through June 21. Call 893-4100 or visit. www.denvercenter.org for information and reservations.