Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sunday)
Bridging cultures
“A Mob Story” boasts impressive dancing and stagecraft. The costumes pop, even as some of the numbers reach beyond the mob’s sobering history in Las Vegas. A number set in the steam room at Caesars Palace plays like a scene in a male revue, with the cast smiling and grooving in towels and tighty-whiteys.
Somehow, director Jeff Kutash has managed to fit that scene, and some operatic moments, in with Franzese’s penetrating stories of taking the mafia “cosa nostra” oath.
How these two cultures can co-mingle in downtown Las Vegas remains to be seen. Selling tickets to any stage show in this city is a tricky prospect. The heady days when a campy water show like “Splash” could fill a showroom void are gone.
But the mob does enjoy an undefinable lure. It is impossible not to be taken to another place as Franzese talks of his former life.
“One of the horrors of that life is that you make a mistake, you walk into a room with your best friend, you might now walk out again,” Franzese says, as matter-of-factly as if he were reciting a lunch order. “The violence is something you have to accept.”
Franzese recalls a night many moons ago when there was “talk on the street that I was maybe making more money than I was turning in,” and he was walking along a street in Brooklyn with a guy behind him — a friend of his — who might finish that walk alone.
“I can still almost hear the crickets chirping, and kind of smell the flowers from that night,” he says. “Everything became so keen to me. It was almost as if I was robotic, because you become so programmed in that life. But you do think, ‘This is it.’ It showed me that I could face death if I had to.”
Michel Franzese walked away, to tell his story in Las Vegas, of all places. He is asked how such a story can work as a piece of musical theater.
“The topic is so authentic and intriguing around the world, and I’ve spoken everywhere,” Franzese says. “It works. So, why wouldn’t it work in Vegas? I’m asking myself the same way I’m asking you. I hope I’m right.”
— John Katsilometes