Too fakey-sweet for real wise guys
“Look to your heart.” “Trust in the beat of your heart.” In related news, “there’s no going back now; they’d say I got no heart.”
That’s a lot of lyrical heavy lifting for one little metaphor. Heart is exactly what “A Bronx Tale” wants to have, what it keeps insisting it has, even though it’s set among outer-borough tough guys in the 1960s: the gangsters and their henchmen; the wannabes and hangers-on; the honest, stoic fathers who resist that world; and the sons they can’t help but bring into it.
The musical, with a book by Chazz Palminteri (who also wrote and performed the one-man play and wrote and co-starred in the film, both of the same name and based on his life), avers that each of these men is complicated, earnest and human behind his mask of grit or glamour.
But the show, which opened Wednesday, Nov. 28, at SHN’s Golden Gate Theatre, hasn’t found an artistic way to make that worthy point within the vocabulary of musical theater.
“This is a Bronx tale, and it’s my story,” the show begins, with thorough command of the self-evident. (Why not sing, “This is a musical, and you’re in a theater”?) The narrator is Calogero (Joey Barreiro), and he’s looking back eight years, to when he was a boy (Frankie Leoni on opening night) who witnesses a mob murder from his Bronx stoop.
When the cops interrogate him, he doesn’t rat, which means that for the rest of his adolescence, he’s pulled between two men: his decent, hardworking father, Lorenzo (Richard H. Blake), and another father figure: the neighborhood kingpin, Sonny (Joe Barbara), who sometimes understands him better than Lorenzo does.
Directed by Robert De Niro and Jerry Zaks, “Tale” most charms when it focuses on the singular, rich details of Belmont Avenue: what local “romancing” looks like (”Marie, get in the f—ing car!”); how TonyTen-to-Two (Paul Salvatoriello) and Rudy the Voice (John Gardiner) got their names; how Sonny doesn’t use two of his fingers; how to test if a woman is “one of the great ones” (it involves the lock on a car’s driver’s side).
The cast make for lovable big palookas. Barbara as Sonny exudes slick control; he’s restrained, choosy in motions, as if to say, “Why should I move, when you could come to me?” Leoni, as the younger Calogero (pronounced Co-LU-zhero) has the snappy zing to his dance moves of a much more mature performer. Barreiro, as his older counterpart, finds a mischievous warmth in his lines as narrator, as if he’s always letting us in on a delectable little secret, one he can’t quite believe himself.
But Glenn Slater’s lyrics teem with cliches. In a single song, he subjects us to “it’s never black or white, just shades of gray,” “when push comes to shove” and “it’s now or never.” In another, he commits the cardinal sin of telling rather than showing: “Things have gotten crazy. Things are out of hand.”
The score, by Alan Menken, pipes in awkwardly, forcing characters to break into song when they’re about to, say, erupt in a fistfight, which makes the neighborhood seem less tough than cute. At best, the music itself vanishes from memory as soon as you hear it. At worst, it makes its black characters — one of whom, Jane (Brianna-Marie Bell), is Calogero’s love interest — sing “Webster Avenue,” which sounds as white as a rejected number from “Grease.”
While a cappella interludes are lovely, like an undiscovered Four Seasons single, the cast’s voices often strain and wheeze, ricocheting off or overshooting their pitches like they’re still at target practice.
“A Bronx Tale” aims for anyone who’s ever been a father or a son, anyone caught between competing loves, anyone who knows bad guys have sweet spots. But the sweetness here cloys, and the fathers and sons remain hazy outlines.
The score ... makes the neighborhood seem less tough than cute.