REVIEW: Actor still tells story with style

They say you can never go home.

Actor and playwright Chazz Palminteri did on June 9, the opening night of his personal coming-of-age story, "A Bronx Tale," playing at the Ellie Caulkins Opera House in Denver.

I went with guarded optimism. Yes, the touring production, which runs through Sunday, starred Palminteri, who wrote and performed the one-man show that inspired Robert De Niro to take it from Off-Broadway to the big screen in 1993. But time is not always kind, and Palminteri, who just turned 57, is many decades from the days when the work played the New York stage.

Happily, it was worth the drive. "A Bronx Tale" turned out to be an often pyrotechnic display of acting chops, comic turns, flashy characters and a fast-paced 90 minutes of stamina, sheer stamina.

The story - and unfortunately, much of the dialogue and narration - will be familiar to fellow fans of the film, which launched Palminteri's big-screen film career and De Niro's too-sporadic forays into directing.

Like the movie, the story follows young Calogero, a 9-year-old who follows the doings of a street-corner gangster named Sonny from his front stoop at 187th Street and Belmont Avenue. Although his father disapproves, Calogero is drawn into the romance and danger of Sonny's growing empire. The perks alone were worth any possible price.

"It was because of Sonny that they treat me so good," says Palminteri as the young Calogero. "I liked it."

In contrast to popular mob operas such as "The Godfather," "Goodfellas" and "The Sopranos," Palminteri makes it a good-natured and fairly bloodless journey, replete with colorful characters (like Eddie Mush, so named because everything he touches turns to mush), accents like blunt objects ("Lock 'm in da bat-room," Sonny says more than once) and surprisingly telling observations about the denizens of his world.

"He had five fingers but Sonny only used three," he says, curling back his two middle fingers into a fleshy stylus that is both stylishly cool and hopelessly affected.

How, I wondered, could he translate this complicated story onto the stage with only a bare-essentials set and soundtrack?

No problem. Palminteri dances, preaches and prestidigitates through character after character with surprising fluidity - a stylish clap and a quick pivot on one foot sometimes flagging the shift from one character to the next. He is quite astonishing to watch.

Unfortunately, the characters are necessarily flatter in this setting. The stage Sonny is more offish than the Sonny Palminteri played in the film - a silky, deadly but beneficent thug. Likewise, the father is metronomic onstage, a Hallmark card of platitudes and frowning lectures.

But, really, who cares if you can sometimes see the magician's sleight of hand? Magic is magic, and "A Bronx Tale" is a trick only one man can pull off.

DETAILS

A Bronx Tale

When: 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday; 2 p.m. Saturday and Sunday; 7:30 p.m. Sunday
Where: Ellie Caulkins Opera House, Denver Center for the Performing Arts, Speer Boulevard and Arapahoe Street in Denver
Tickets: $20 to $80; 1-800-641-1222, denvercenter.org

GRADE: A-