ALL THAT CHAZZ
Palminteri spins a soiled yarn.

Nearly 20 years ago, when Chazz Palminteri first performed A Bronx Tale, many people assumed that this coarse, morally stunted solo play was a work of autobiographical nonfiction. Granted, the hulking actor narrates the show as if it were true, using his own name and those of his parents; but still, one marvels that anyone could have fallen for a tale so outrageously factitious. This is, after all, a play whose risible climactic sequence involves, in immediate succession: a hate crime, a breakup, two murder plots, a rescue, a reconciliation, a fatal fireball, an assassination, a silent-scream sequence and an anguished cry of “Nooooooo!” This is not a slice of life. This is a slice of processed cheese.

In Palminteri’s telling, the wiseguys who ruled over his neighborhood in the 1960s were bright cartoon gangsters with one signature hand gesture apiece, their thuggishness subsumed to colorful antics. (It’s hard to be shaken by a baseball-bat beating when a threat of the same has been made at the start of the show to those who don’t turn off their cell phones.) When he is not busy dusting bullies with sugar, Palminteri is even busier sentimentalizing them through the story of a mob boss named Sonny who takes our narrator under his wing, to the chagrin of the boy’s hardworking dad. (The kid supposedly learns something from each of his father figures, though it’s not clear what.) Those who have brought this claptrap to Broadway should be ashamed, as should any audience that applauds it. The only cheers Palminteri earns here are the Bronx kind.